


Heart Piercing

by Gamebird



Series: Gamebird's TOG Series [2]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: All ships are as they are in canon, Booker in exile for most of this, Canon-Typical Violence, Copley exists but isn't involved in the story, Face-stabby torture in the prologue, Former/semi-present Andy/Quynh, Gen, Joe/Nicky - Freeform, Mention of past suicidal ideation on Andy's part, No permanent main character death, No sexual content aside from innuendo and jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:34:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 26,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29111664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gamebird/pseuds/Gamebird
Summary: After the events of the movie, Andy and the gang have a new mission: finding Quynh. But finding her might turn out to be something other than the happy reunion they hope for.
Series: Gamebird's TOG Series [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2138370
Comments: 50
Kudos: 47
Collections: The Old Guard Big Bang





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This is the only chapter not from Andy's point of view. It's set six months into the future from the beginning of the main story and begins immediately after the last scene of the movie.
> 
> Perfect Big Bang art by thatmartiangirl (https://thatmartiangirl.tumblr.com/) in Chapter 8. Beta by darkswanone.

"Booker," Quynh said. "It's nice to finally meet you." She raised the glass and sipped.

Sebastien's aim did not waiver despite the high percentage of alcohol in his bloodstream. He was stunned to see her, finally, after all these years of half-knowing her. But the half he knew didn't make him interested in the rest. There were _reasons_ why he'd kept his silence all these years, reasons he was too cynical to think weren't about to be validated. After she finished her drink and looked at him expectantly, he said in the oldest French he knew, "Yeah. I guess so. No more nightmares." He had understood her, but what she was speaking barely passed as French.

She smiled and confirmed that she understood him in turn, saying, "That remains to be seen. Where's Andromache?"

"Don't know."

Quynh made a single blink, or a bat of her eyes. Whatever it was, it read as 'angry'. "Why not?" she said after a suitable pause to confirm the meaning of her expression.

Sebastien smirked and gave a hollow laugh, still keeping his gun on her. It was ironic that Quynh would come to him at the one time in his life when he not only wasn't sure where the gang was, but was forbidden from finding out. Not that he would have helped her anyway. Not without thoroughly understanding her motives. Two centuries of her crazed rage in his mind gave him a pretty good sense of what they were. "Funny story, there. They kicked me out – exile." He had to use the modern word for 'exile'.

"Why?"

"I betrayed them." He had no hesitation in admitting it. It was true, after all. Maybe she'd leave and he could call Copley and send a warning. Something.

"How long ago was this?" She moved with a fluid sway to her hips, bringing herself out from behind the apartment's small table and chairs so there was nothing between them.

He didn't like that. He edged toward the door, not that he had far to go. He felt penned in and she was still most of the room away from him. It wasn't a big room, though. "About six months."

"You will help me find them."

"No, I don't think so." His tone was definite even if his words weren't.

She bristled and drew herself up. "I have a score to settle with Andromache. If they kicked you out, then they are no friends of yours."

Sebastien gave one slow shake of his head. "No. They were justified. We're still friends." The only path back to the only family he had left lay in never betraying them again in any way. Pointing Quynh at them was even more dangerous than making arrangements with Copley for acquisition of sample material and then having things go disastrously off the rails. He wasn't about to send Quynh after them – not after two hundred years of her wrath in his head.

Speaking of which, he wasn't entirely caught off-guard as she jumped toward him. It was his trigger finger against her speed. Against everyone else he'd ever faced off with, even Andy when they sparred, he would have won. The bullet creased the side of Quynh's head, but that was all. He fired again and missed entirely. Totally unfazed by the shot that had hit, she'd dropped low and was now coming up in a smooth sweep that drove her shoulder into his midsection and collapsed him onto his back. His head hit the door solidly on the way down.

Despite the stars in his vision, he was still in the fight. He brought the gun around and shot her in the gut, taking the center-of-mass shot rather than aiming for her head again. She jerked at the impact and snatched the weapon away from him as quick as a striking snake. She held it awkwardly out to the side and for an instant, he suspected she had no idea how to use it. How would she?

She was a faster learner than he'd anticipated and proved it by putting a bullet through his skull before he could do anything about it. He came to with an uneasy awareness of constriction on his neck. He was suffocating, but more importantly his brain wasn't getting any new blood. He blearily pawed at the thigh being pressed against his throat. She had him in a triangle choke. His options for escaping it were limited, and impossible given that he passed out immediately.

He woke up with his arms splayed to either side and a sharp pain in his forearms. He pulled. They were restrained. Also, it hurt to do that. He looked at them. The manner of restraint was a kitchen knife stabbed between his ulna and radius, passing through the middle of his forearm, and embedded firmly into the wood flooring beyond. In addition to hurting, it had that strong, stinging itch of incomplete healing, where his flesh wanted to knit together, but couldn't.

He blinked at that. He'd been roughed up a few times when captured by the wrong people, but he'd never been in the hands of anyone who knew he would heal later and took full advantage of that. Just because he couldn't die, didn't mean he couldn't be hurt. In fact, he could be hurt _a lot_ – however much someone wanted to hurt him – and still bounce back for questioning. It was a sickening prospect, one he really hadn't had time to consider in Merrick's lab.

Quynh was sitting on the floor above his head. She leaned over to look him in the face. "You didn't have rope."

"Oh." He nodded. While this was true, it made him wonder if she'd ever done this before. To Joe? Nicky? Seemed unlikely. Neither would have forgiven harm to the other. Certainly not to Andy. Had she tortured regular humans for amusement then? What had the others done about that? Had they … approved? Allowed it? Quynh had travelled with the three for centuries. No matter what had happened to her under the sea, she wasn't acting like this was an entirely new side of her personality.

She had another knife in her hand. "These are very low-quality blades." She toyed with it, getting a feel for its balance.

"They're meant for cooking, not fighting," he said slowly. He'd rented a furnished apartment. The knives had come with the place. He wasn't about to tell her where he kept the good ones.

"Cutting meat is the same either way."

"Mm," he said, wondering again about the moral high ground claimed by Joe, Nicky, and Andy when this had been one of their companions. "I'd ask when the torture starts, but obviously it's already begun."

She didn't even deny it. "Tell me about your betrayal."

"This isn't really-" He'd been going to tell her it wasn't necessary and she didn't need to pin him to the floor to get answers about that. As long as she kept away from the topic of where Andy was, he was fine with telling her most anything.

But she wanted to be the one calling the shots. She set the point of the knife against his forehead, firmly enough that the dull tip cut through skin and stuck against his skull. "Why do you argue? You know me well. You have seen me in your dreams for your entire life."

"Ah … that would be the reason."

She frowned. "Tell me."

"About the betrayal?" She pressed on the knife. The pressure was uncomfortable but the torment involved was mostly psychological at this point. He knew he was being difficult, as it was obvious what she wanted to know. He let her have her way, but he had to take a moment to find simple, archaic words to get the information across. "Yeah, okay. Um. I found someone who was willing to study us and maybe find out how to end our existence. Then I … led the group to them and we were … taken captive. Me among them."

She lifted the knife. "But you escaped." He nodded. She asked, "Did all of you escape?"

"Yes."

"What of Nile Freeman?"

She knew Nile's full name. That was not good. He filed that away. "Uh … yeah, she escaped, too."

She stabbed him in the eye. There was no warning. It was so fast, he barely saw it coming and with no time to react before the blade sunk in. His body bucked, but he wasn't sure what happened after that because his brain wasn't working right. He could only assume she'd stabbed him more than once in the head.

When he came to, she was using that book Andy had given him half a year ago to pound one of the knives through his arm again. He must have broken free. But his other hand was already (or still?) restrained as before and by the time he could think straight, so was this one. He hoped she hadn't damaged the book, but he feared mentioning it lest it let her know it mattered to him.

She turned to him. "Don't lie. Tell me what happened with Nile Freeman."

He hesitated while the rest of his brain matter knitted itself together. "You dream of her, too?"

"Of course I do."

"Then … you know what happened to her," he told her. She picked up the knife she'd stabbed him in the eye with. He flinched. Obviously, that wasn't the right answer. He hated himself for blurting out, "Nile was never … captive." He would have rather thought through the ramifications before speaking. But he couldn't stop his tongue and he didn't think he was saying anything wrong. "She helped us escape."

"Ah. The truth then." She turned her hand to run her knuckles along his cheek. "See? I can be kind."

"Uh-huh." He was starting to get nervous. Would he be able to keep his mouth shut under torture if she asked for things he didn't want her to know?

"You sound unconvinced."

"Being stabbed in the eye convinced me of the opposite."

"Perhaps so." She made a show of considering that. "How can I find Andromache? Tell me, and I will release you from this."

Well, there it was. He had an appalling second where he knew he could tell her and she'd go away, leaving him alone and without further harm. He was absolutely certain that not telling her would get him hurt. Welp. He'd been hurt a lot over his life. He might as well be a smartass while he was at it. "I'm supposed to meet them at a bar in London in a hundred years."

"One hundred years?"

"Um, from now, ninety-nine years and six months. Roughly." Not like he was keeping track or anything. (Which he definitely was.)

Her lip curled in disgust. "How do you find her?"

"I go to the bar." He was frankly surprised he hadn't been stabbed again yet.

"No." She bared her teeth briefly. " _Now_. If you needed to talk with her."

He looked from the knife to her. She was angry, but she needed his information. She had to think he was going to give it to her. He said slowly, "I don't know. I didn't ask. It wasn't something I was supposed to know." His nerves were starting to calm as he realized he wasn't going to tell her, no matter what.

"You're useless!"

"I intend to honor the terms of the exile."

"And you're stupid." She stabbed him again. This time, he'd expected it. He cringed. It was the other eye this time but only the one penetration. She pulled the knife out quickly enough. Even though he healed almost instantly, it still left him twitchy and blinking, torn between putting up the sort of fight that would get him free (and stabbed more) or continuing to comply (and only getting stabbed every now and then). She sneered, "You must know somewhere she's likely to be."

"I don't."

She knifed his face repeatedly, mostly the lower part so he was still able to think while she did it. He yanked free of his restraints (the blades were not seated so deeply in the wood floor that he couldn't, with pain and effort, pull them out) and rolled away, shielding his face. He contemplated his odds if he just out and out attacked her. He didn't think they were good, but at a certain point, he might as well. She paused to hiss at him, "You're lying!"

"Yeah, I am!" he said in outrage. "I'm not helping you find her! For two hundred years I kept her from knowing about you! Because she doesn't _need_ to know about you!" He spoke with bitter anger and no regret – not on this subject. He'd had a long time to think about it. "Whatever person she loved from before is gone and she doesn't need to know that! She doesn't need to know what you've become. Let her have her memories of loving you before the ocean crushed you into something awful!" His voice softened. "If you still love her at all, then let her be. For her sake."

"Two hundred years!" Quynh said, ignoring his plea like he hadn't made it. "That means she had hundreds before that. How long did she search for me before giving up?"

"I was told decades." He shifted so he had his feet a little better under him. He was still crouching defensively in the corner made by the wall and the door. He didn't want to fight her. Even if he'd been sure he could beat her, he wouldn't have wanted to fight her. There was no winning here.

"Not long enough, then!" She turned and spat on the floor. "She promised me to the end!"

"And you've gone crazy alone. I know-"

She picked up one of the knives that had been in his forearms and flung it at him, skewering his shoulder. "You know nothing about it! You may have had dreams, but you know nothing! Nothing about being alone! Abandoned! Hopeless and helpless! This is exile? Ha!" She made a casual wave at his surroundings. The kindness of his penalty had never been lost on him. "They should have walled you up in a tomb!"

The threat to enhance his penalty was not lost on him, either. He pulled out the knife and frowned at it. They really were low-quality steel. But it was still better than nothing. Just because he didn't want to fight didn't mean he _wouldn't_.

"I will make you useful," she said and surged toward him before he realized her rant had ended and something else had begun. He didn't wake up as quickly this time.


	2. The Plan

_Six months earlier, outside Copley's house in Surrey, England …_

"So," Nile asked as they walked outside, heels crunching on the fine gravel of the upper-class driveway, "what do we do while Copley covers our tracks and researches a new job for us?"

Andy went to the modest, beat-up car they'd been using, concentrating on keeping her stride even and her spine straight, even though every step was a twinging reminder of the unhealed hole in her side. She looked up at the house and thought about the estate. He looked rich. She didn't trust rich. If they'd still had Booker, she would have asked for a profile so she understood Copley's resources and perhaps gained more understanding of his motivations. But she didn't have Booker. It would take a while to adjust to that.

She turned to Nile. "No man left behind, remember? We look for Quynh." Andy felt hopeful for the first time in a very long time. It had been centuries since she'd thought there was a chance at getting Quynh back. She stopped next to the driver's side door, putting the issue of Copley and Booker out of her mind. "This is going to be more complicated than breaking us out of Merrick's lab. Let's start by dusting off our old notes." She looked to Joe. "Where did we leave those?"

"Almeria. Spain." He looked thoughtful. "It's been a while since I've been there."

"We start there." She climbed in the car. It hurt where she'd been shot – she was still working out which movements gave her pain and which didn't. She wanted to rush forward and get things done, but her body had other ideas. It felt like she was re-injuring herself for things as mild as rotating at the waist when she got in the car. Joe took the front passenger seat, shooting her a look that told her he'd noticed how she was favoring her side, despite her efforts to conceal it. She shot him a look in return to make sure he kept his mouth shut. He looked out the window at the verdant countryside. Nicky and Nile took the back seat.

Andy drove – aimlessly at the moment, trending basically toward London. She didn't know the streets, but her sense of direction was as good as ever. She thought about Quynh, this being the first time she'd had much of a chance to since discovering Quynh was still alive. To say she loved her would be an unjust oversimplification. Their relationship spanned more than three thousand years – 'complicated' was the least of it. Empires, languages, and entire religions had rose and fell while Andromache and Quynh had known one another.

Andy barely knew who she'd been before Quynh, before she'd had someone immortal like herself to talk to, someone who could reflect her thoughts back to herself, someone who assured Andy she hadn't gone insane in the long, long years. Someone who had given meaning to her existence and given her back the soul she'd lost in the forever that stretched so far behind her. Maybe it could have been anyone immortal, but it had been Quynh. It had always been Quynh.

They'd never been the sort of couple that Joe and Nicky were – which would be called codependent if there was a form of codependency that was healthy. Symbiotic, maybe. Joe and Nicky were two sides of the same coin, eternally joined and never wanting anything more or less. Booker had been right – nothing else in the world mattered to them because they always had each other.

She and Quynh had never had the relationship between the two of them as a pair that they'd had as a triad with Lykon. He'd jokingly styled himself the man of the three, and while of course he _was_ , it lent itself to a family dynamic which was an act for a few decades but soon morphed into fact. He was their man; they were his women; they belonged to one another.

It had been different for Quynh and Andy. They didn't belong to one another. Nor were they soulmates. They didn't have to be to mean so much to each other. Andy didn't see the relationship as any greater or less, no deeper or shallower. It was simply different. She and Quynh had been together (with occasional partings) for three times as long as Joe and Nicky had been alive so far, the same three times as long as Lykon had lived. She had no doubts about the durability of their feelings for one another.

But five hundred years apart with Quynh tortured and tormented the entire time? Quynh would not be the same after that. _Andy_ was not the same and all she'd had to endure was the grief, depression, and bitterness of unavoidable failure and loss. She'd been a hollowed out shell of her former self for centuries after Quynh was lost, trying to find meaning in helping others and fighting evil. It hadn't worked. She'd despaired so much that a year ago she'd told Booker she wanted to die, to be permanently gone and released from this world.

She hadn't told Joe and Nicky that at the time. She hadn't had the heart to. She'd taken a year off traveling instead, trying to get her head straight. Now that her own words had indubitably played a role in Booker's actions, she still hadn't told them. She'd thought about it as they discussed the price Booker should pay, while they sat in that bar in London. Eventually, she'd decided it didn't make a difference. Booker had kept secret Quynh's survival and he'd callously or carelessly endangered Joe and Nicky. Regardless of his intention, he'd fucked up. Guilt still gnawed at her.

She didn't want to die anymore – not after seeing Copley's board and Nile's guileless, sincere face. Nile had given her a reason to give life another chance. Quynh had brought her the same some three millennia ago. She looked forward to the two of them meeting. She just needed to arrange it. She looked at Nile in the rearview mirror. "Do you know anything about undersea recovery efforts?"

"No."

"Hm." She frowned in disappointment. They couldn't be that lucky.

Joe asked, "Why not assign Copley?"

"You already know."

He nodded and went back to watching the land roll by.

After a long pause, Nile asked, "Can you share, or is that a secret?"

Joe huffed a laugh. Nile's lack of history with them was going to require a lot of things to be spelled out. Andy said, "When you've been together for hundreds of years, some things start to go unmentioned. It's not a secret. Copley sold us to Merrick _after_ putting together that history presentation and thinking we're heroes. I'm not going to trust him with Quynh."

Nile nodded. Next to Nile, Nicky asked, "How much do these things cost?"

"What?" Nile asked him. "Undersea recovery missions?" He nodded. "Millions?" she guessed. "You'd have to rent a boat, all the equipment and sensors, a crew to operate everything. You'd have to know where to look." She paused. "You _do_ know where to look, right?"

"Not really," Andy said glumly. "That's what stopped us before. We tracked down everyone on the ship. We took the ship's logs. We got maps. We consulted with experts. In the end, we managed to narrow it down to a … really big area." A depressingly big area.

Nicky took over the explanation. "The ship left the port of Plymouth shortly after first light. It sailed south the day and the night. The next day the winds calmed. They drifted. They drank. When they were sufficiently drunk, they dropped Quynh into the water. They drank more. The winds picked up. As night fell, they updated their navigational logs for the day, realizing they had significantly drifted off-course to the west. As such, they falsified the entry in the logs. No one we were able to find remembered what the observed coordinates were, which they did not observe anyway until hours after dropping Quynh."

"Oh no," Nile said, heartfelt. Then, "You're kidding?" She looked at Nicky intently. "You're not kidding?" He shrugged one shoulder. She said, "I can't tell."

Andy smirked to herself. Nicky was pulling a long con on Nile – both she and Joe knew it, and neither of them were interfering (yet). It was hilarious, but she worried about what it would do the team dynamic when Nile figured out he was misrepresenting whatever it was he was going to misrepresent. For the present, he wasn't lying – just being 'off', which Nile was picking up on. Point for her.

Joe said, "He's not kidding. The range of possible drop points was … huge." Understatement. If there'd been any hope of finding her, they would have kept trying. The failure had gutted Andy in a way she'd never recovered from. But now there was a glimmer of promise – maybe something in modern technology would allow them success.

The car was silent for a few beats as everyone digested the magnitude of what they were going to attempt in finding Quynh. Joe and Nicky were probably thinking about the decades-long search and extreme hardship they'd endured before. To their credit, neither had objected and they didn't now. They'd always told her they understood, because they'd do the same if it was the other of their pair. Distantly, Andy said, "I think I killed forty-seven people that one night." She shook her head. It had been such a waste.

"You were very angry," Joe said.

She laughed hollowly and swallowed hard. "That cretin falsified the logs so he wouldn't get in trouble for them spending the afternoon in their cups. I killed every one of them who knew about it or suspected. And then I killed the ones who objected to me killing the guilty. But it still didn't get me what I wanted. What I needed." She gripped the steering wheel harder and felt a twinge from her side.

Every life she'd taken that day had been of a relatively well-meaning sailor, following orders and the basic social order of things. They didn't know Quynh and even if they had, she was too strange to have been one of their people. They would have rejected her – not a sailor or an Englishman or a man or a Christian. Andy had killed them anyway – not because of who they were, but because of what they'd done. She tried to tell herself that made her different from them. In her weaker moments, she felt guilt.

"That was a long time ago," Nile said. Then, as thought she could read Andy's mind, she added, "I know we just murdered, like, about as many just a few days ago, but is killing people really our main problem-solving method?"

"No," Nicky said. Joe was silent. Andy noticed him tilt his head slightly in acknowledgement of the point. Joe had always been of the 'life is cheap' interpretation, which was funny because it was 'all life is sacred' Nicky who would really mow through people once he set himself to a goal.

"It works," Andy said, not wanting to argue something so potentially volatile at this point. "But no," she sighed again, "we try not to kill people."

"You were very angry," Joe said again. "I have never seen you so angry as that time."

She couldn't remember being angrier either, as that moment when she realized selfish, self-absorbed human error had cost her the ability to find Quynh. They'd tried anyway, of course, drowning and dying from pressure and sharks (how she hated sharks) until she could see the terror and misery in Joe and Nicky's faces whenever they turned to the sea. Eventually, she couldn't ask them to continue. Not in good conscience. Not with no hope. But she had hope now. "Well, now we're going to do something about it." She glanced in the rearview again at Nile and Nicky in the back seat. "You said it would cost millions. How much is that Rodin worth?"

"Ah … millions." After a pause, Nile said, "You know, if you found someone who already had a boat, someone who was really into antiquities and buried treasure and stuff, you might could trade them that Rodin for a lot more than you'd get just selling it. Maybe we could partner with them. I'm sure you know where other sunken ships are they can go after if they'd help you find this one thing first."

"Other sunken ships," Andy smirked. Yeah, like she just happened to know where a lot of buried treasure was that she'd never bothered to go get already. But – one problem at a time. She spotted signs directing her to a road she recognized. She turned the car that direction. "So. We go to France, pick up the statue. Go to Spain, pick up our notes. Then we find some experts on oceanography and treasure hunting. Then we find Quynh. That's the plan."


	3. All the Rest

Everything seemed to take so long. They drove to Paris, which was a good test of the passport Copley had provided to Nile. The rest of them would, at least for now, continue using the old ones they'd recovered from the safe house. They had no issues getting through customs, so they went on to the cave. By then, Andy was struggling – tired and hurting to the point of distraction. She could no longer hide it. It felt like her whole body was strained, muscles protesting the long hours of trying to compensate for her injury.

She got out of the car to see if a different position helped. Her head still hurt and her vision didn't seem right. Her jaw was clenched and her shoulders were tight. "Just go in and get it," she told the others irritably, waving them at the wall of green that concealed the cave entrance. Joe and Nicky regarded the vegetation with uncertainty. The last time they'd been here, it had looked different. Nile remembered, though and led the way. The two men cast a concerned look Andy's way, then followed Nile.

Andy shut her eyes, held her side, and focused on breathing and trying to relax. It hurt so much – a stabbing, throbbing pain with a constant pressure that radiated from the center of the wound. She was nauseated and weak. Part of the problem was she had no idea what was normal suffering and what she should be concerned about. She tried to think through what she'd do if she was dealing with a regular mortal who'd been shot like this, but Nicky and Book were the ones with medical training. Not her.

She straightened and then pretended a casual slouch as she heard them returning. They emerged. Nile told her, "There's no battery on my phone." Joe and Nicky followed her, empty-handed.

"Where's the statue?"

Nile answered, "All I need are pictures. We don't need to be hauling around a priceless masterpiece in the trunk. I've always had a thing for art history, you know."

Andy sighed. "If we have it, we can trade it."

"If we have it, it can be stolen from us," Nile countered.

"They'd regret that decision," Andy said.

Nile shrugged. " _If_ you caught them. And what if we get in an accident? The point is, it's safe here. We take pictures and travel light."

Andy looked at Joe and Nicky, who weren't showing any opinion on the matter … except that they'd left the cave empty-handed when Andy had specifically told them to get it. She wasn't well enough to get it herself. She dug out the keys and threw them at Joe, who caught them out of the air. "Boss?" he asked.

"You drive." She didn't feel like the boss. She climbed in the back with Nile and tried to find a comfortable position to rest in. That did not work, but at least she could relax better now that she wasn't driving. Once they had the pictures (and yet another detour to get a new laptop so Nile could scrub location data from the photos, since Booker hadn't left his password and no one was going to make contact with him to get it), then it was on to Almeria.

That was a full day and most of the night driving. Joe traded with Nicky who traded with Nile and then the next time they stopped for fuel, Joe was driving again before Andy could put together that she'd been passed over. She would have complained, but she felt bone-tired even though she'd been pretending to sleep the entire time. Her brain felt numb.

If nothing else, it was a good way to avoid being drawn into the tiresome theological discussion the three of them enthusiastically engaged in for most of the drive. Nile had found her people. The entire history of the Peoples of the Scripture was being recounted, featuring entertaining personal stories, eye-witness accounts, and fascinating nuances of the last millennia of evolution of the Abrahamic faiths! It wasn't all historical - Nile's first-person point of view on the current state of religion in the US was eagerly received by Joe and Nicky.

Andy found the whole thing more boring than football. Really – put people on horses, give them gaff hooks and a dead goat to fight over? That was exciting! Punting around an inflated sportsball on a manicured field just wasn't. The whole idea of sport was risk. All the modern ones were so sanitized.

It was past dawn when they pulled into an upscale hotel in what had once been the old district of the city of Almeria (actually, the real 'old' district had been largely reduced to rubble by earthquakes five hundred years ago, but everyone living here now considered the hotel to be in the 'old' district). It had been new the last time they'd been in the city. But it still looked nice. It boasted Arabian baths and a view of the fortress and cathedral. Joe and Nicky made innuendo about the baths until Nile jokingly told them to shut up. Laughing, Joe went inside to make arrangements for a room.

"No baths for me. I need to rest," Andy said.

Nicky turned around from the front seat. "That's fine. Joe and I will have to go find his records first, anyway. We left them prepaid in storage, but it's possible they might have decided not to honor such."

"How long has it been?" Nile asked.

Nicky shrugged. "Seventy years?"

Nile sputtered. "You really think you still have things in storage after all that time?"

"We prepaid," Nicky said.

Nile covered her mouth laughing. "You 'prepaid'. Okay. Why didn't we just call down here first before driving all day and all night?"

"It was eighty years ago," Andy said, deciding to ignore the kid's excellent point and ego-bruising criticism of their tactics. Why hadn't she thought of that? Was her brain going out as well as everything else? "We left right after the war ended."

"World War … II?" Nile asked.

"No," Andy said. "The Spanish Civil War. World War II came after that."

"Where were you guys during that?" Nile asked. "All the … Holocaust stuff?"

Andy didn't answer. She remembered an evening in Italy in 1939 or 1940. The four of them had returned from a public house in Milan where they'd listened to people excited by the prospect of Italy joining forces with Hitler's Germany. They (her, Joe, Nicky, and Booker) knew what was going on – in Germany, in Poland, in Austria. Obviously, soon in Italy if the people they'd heard had their way.

They knew and they cared. Booker had a personal stake in the treatment of Jews, for all he wouldn't admit to it. Joe and Nicky had their own personal stake in the treatment of homosexuals. The three of them were brainstorming how to disrupt Nazi operations. Booker, who was still new to the team and knew nothing of battle. Joe and Nicky who weren't half as discreet as they thought. She'd lost Quynh to religious zealots. She wasn't going to lose them.

Nicky said, "The Pacific theatre, mostly."

"Some of the islands-" Andy started, then said, "Ah, there's Joe." There would be time for a history lesson later.

Nicky climbed out of the car to stand next to it, looking over the roof of it at his love. "Hey, Joe. How long did we prepay storage on that chest?"

"A hundred years."

"A hundred-" Nile was laughing again as she got out of the car on Nicky's side. Andy got out as well. She was stiff and sore and still feeling the numbing vibration of the car in motion. Nile's laughter cut off as she looked at her three not-laughing companions. "Okay, where I come from, that's weird. That's just really weird. A hundred years? Don't they ask questions about that?"

"A few," Nicky allowed.

Andy shrugged, trying to work the stiffness out of her neck. "From where you come from now? It's not that weird. Give it a few centuries."

"Or just decades," Joe said. He handed Andy the room key and relayed directions for where it was. She nodded and headed inside, trying not to hobble like a horse that needed to be put down. Nile was still shaking her head as she followed her, her computer bag slung over her back. Joe and Nicky got back in the car and drove off.

"This seems normal to you, right?" Andy asked as she opened the hotel room.

"What, the room?" There were two beds, a bathroom, and a more extensive kitchenette than most hotel rooms came with. Joe had splurged. And he expected to be here for a while, which Andy suspected had to do with his (sadly accurate) assessment of her condition. "Looks like you could actually cook in here," Nile observed. There was even a breakfast table with four chairs.

"No. Me needing to rest. Is that normal?" Joe and Nicky still felt fresh enough to head right out on their mission to recover their chest of notes. Under 'normal' circumstances, Andy would have been right there with them. But she was exhausted. She ached. There was a throbbing at the back of her head and behind her eyes. She sat on the bed wearily.

"Uh, we've crossed countries and had gun battles and I've died a few times," Nile said, tossing her bag on the other bed. "We drove two days and … No, if anything's weird, it's that I don't feel all that run down. I feel pretty good." Nile went over to tinker with the thermostat. "Do you care what temperature I set this?"

"No." She laid down carefully and gave Nile's obliviousness an amused smile. "You're going to feel pretty good from now on, kid. Enjoy it." She thought about all the mortals she'd blown off and blown past over the years, leaving them behind because they had to step out for injuries or simply lost the will to keep up. She had more respect for them now.

Nile turned and gave her a long look, obviously not as oblivious as Andy had initially thought. "How long has it been since you've taken your medicine?"

"Those antibiotics?" She thought about it. "Fourteen hours." She looked at the clock next to the bed to check her sense of time. It was right. So at least that part of her faculties was still working.

"You should be taking them every eight. You missed your painkillers, too, then." Nile dug around in her bag, found the pills, and brought them to her along with a glass of water. The antibiotics were huge, yellow, and had an obnoxiously sharp taste to them. The painkillers were oblong and white. Neither were appealing, but they were a mandatory part of the care and feeding of injured mortals, whose number included herself now.

"Thank you," she managed to say before choking the things down. She was still getting used to this whole 'take pills' thing. "I'll try to remember next time."

"When's the last time you ate? You need to have something on your stomach for those painkillers or else you'll get sick."

"I'm taking them because I'm _already_ sick," she said irritably.

"Uh, you can get sicker. You know that, right?"

Andy considered killing Nile just to prove she didn't need the mother-hen act. But it seemed rude and uncalled for. Also, she actually _was_ hungry and even Copley had said, when he handed over the pills, that she needed to eat something when taking the medication. "Fine. Go get me something from the hotel restaurant. I don't care what."

"Aren't I supposed to stay here and guard you?"

"From what?" She shot Nile a perturbed look, while trying to remember if there was any reason to suspect they had enemies on their tail. She supposed they could be concerned about Merrick's successor, but she expected whatever heirs he had would be fighting over the metaphorical carcass of the company for a long time. Besides, Copley's first assigned priority had been to cover their tracks. Which included _his_ tracks, so it seemed likely he'd do it. "I can guard myself."

Nile gave her a dubious expression that did more to make Andromache feel helpless than anything else that had yet happened. "I could call room service."

"Did Joe and Nicky put you up to this?" Andy scrubbed at her face. She thought she'd been awake the whole car ride. She didn't remember them talking about the need to hover over her like nursemaids. Nile said nothing. "Just go." Nile went.

* * *

Andromache sipped the orange juice Nile had brought with breakfast. Everything tasted dull. Her tongue felt … fuzzy? Her side _still_ hurt every time she moved and after all the days that had passed the pain _still being there_ was the most offensive thing. Close on its heels in the contest of 'most offensive' was this ongoing sprouting of new, annoying side effects and symptoms. The overall lethargy despite having done nothing of significance was in third place. "How long did you say it will take to recover from this gunshot wound?"

"Weeks," Nile said. "And at least this first part, you really should be doing bedrest and not traveling across the world."

"Bedrest isn't much different from being in a car."

Nile grimaced and tried to hide a smile. "You know, ultimately, you do you. I'm not your mom. I'm not your doctor. I'm trying to be your friend, here and I'm trying really hard to remember that it has been literal ages since you've had to deal with anything even remotely like this."

Andy was definitely feeling like the weak link in the team, skipped for her share of driving, guarded (from what?), and assigned a babysitter. She wanted to argue it wasn't needed. She wanted to put a knife in someone and Nile was handy. But Nile was right and it was such a bitter pill to swallow. "Thank you for breakfast," Andy said through her teeth, putting aside the remainders of the meal. She didn't have much appetite, which she suspected was due to the pain or maybe the pills. Hopefully, she'd eaten enough for the requirements of the medication. "I'll try to be more grateful."

"No that's-" Nile's voice caught. "That's not what I meant."

Andy raised a brow at her. It _was_ what Nile had meant, she just hadn't intended to be offensive. Andy said, "Thank you for trying to be a friend. We've known each other less than a week. You don't owe me anything and I don't owe you. I hurt and I'm angry about hurting and I'm angry that from now on, every time I _get_ hurt it's not going to stop." She remembered stories from old warriors about aches that never stopped, tendon and joint pain that took years to resolve if ever, and other injuries where they simply never regained their previous level of ability. Mortality sucked.

Andy said, "I just want to get Quynh back in the time I have left." She scooted down to lie flat on the bed. "Or die trying."

"Okay, I understand that," Nile chattered on, missing the cue that she wanted to rest and have nothing to do with the world. Joe or Nicky wouldn't have missed it. Or Book. Nile went on, "Technology's changed a lot. Maybe we can find her now when you couldn't before. Did Booker _say_ she was dead – before, you know, way back?"

"He said the dreams stopped. We made assumptions. Not least of which was that he was telling the truth." He wasn't the best liar she'd ever seen, but he was good. Also, he hadn't trusted them back then. Had he ever? She'd failed somewhere back there with him. It had led to all this bad blood. She was too tired to think about it. She shut her eyes.

Nile said, "I haven't had a dream of her since that last one I mentioned in the safehouse. Of course, I've hardly slept since then."

Andy waved at the bed Nile was sitting on. "Get some sleep, then."

"I'm not sleepy."

" _I_ am." Andy gave her a pointed look before shutting her eyes again.

"Oh." _Now_ Nile got the point.

Andy sighed. She didn't want to leave things there, so she offered, "Sometimes the dreams are every night. More often there are weeks or months between them. When we do dream, we all have it. Like when Sebastien first happened, Joe, Nicky, and I would all dream him together. And with you – all four of us dreamed you."

"Who's Sebastien? Is that Booker? Didn't Joe call him that?"

Andy looked over at her and laughed very lightly. "We really bungled introductions, didn't we? Yeah, that's his name – his real name. Booker's just a nickname." She was quiet for a moment and then added, "You might hear Nicky called Nicolo or Joe called Yusuf. Those were their original names."

"And yours?"

"Ng." Andy made an inarticulate sound at being asked a question she didn't want to answer. She shut her eyes again. They felt so heavy, burning behind the lids. "Just … call me Andy."

She could hear Nile taking her boots off. "Okay. So that night at the safe house, Booker had that same dream as I did?"

Andy nodded, eyes still shut. "And he didn't say a word." That part of his betrayal still stung. She heard Nile arrange herself on the other bed. Slumber took them both.

* * *

Joe and Nicky didn't return until dinner, with news that the storage business had changed ownership some forty years before and invalidated all prepaid accounts. They'd refunded the ones they had good addresses for and auctioned off the rest. Records for the auction were not kept, but they'd found someone who remembered who had bought most of the stuff, that he'd died twenty years ago, that his primary heir had moved to Navarre, and hadn't answered his phone when they'd called. Andy watched as Nile kept her head down and ate her dinner in a tense silence.

"You know," Andy said to her, "you can say 'I told you so'."

"No, that would be-," Nile started, struggling not to smile. "That would be rude. And besides, that was a lot of investigation to get done in one day. I'm impressed."

"That's why we're here in person," Andy said. "You can track stuff down face to face better than using phones."

"We lose a lot of things," Joe said. "There was nothing in the chest that was irreplaceable – just records, money, a few knives and souvenirs."

"And souvenir knives," Nicky said with a hint of a smile.

Joe shrugged and gestured expansively as he explained things to Nile. "Time passes. Things degrade. It's very difficult to keep things for hundreds of years unless you put them somewhere inaccessible. And then you don't have them where _you_ can get to them."

"People are everywhere," Andy grumbled. "And they get into everything. If you don't keep it with you, it doesn't really belong to you anymore."

"Including your stuff in the cave?" Nile asked.

Andy nodded. "Which is why I wanted to bring the statue with us, now that we need it."

"Oh."

Andy said, "But now all we have for the search area is our memories for the coordinates."

Nicky sighed. "I don't remember the numbers."

"I think I can map it," Joe said.

"You think so?" Andy asked.

Joe nodded. "I think so. I must have drawn it a hundred times. We just need a good cartographic map. Ocean-o-graphic?" He glanced around the table to check the word or his pronunciation of it.

Nile didn't seem to know why Joe was looking. Nicky offered, "I hate English," when Joe looked at him. Nile gave Nicky a side-eye, having yet to discover he had grudges against entire languages.

If Booker were here, Andy would make a bet with him on how long it would take Nicky to teach her to speak something else. But he wasn't. She made a 'go on' gesture to Joe, who said, "I might be off by a few miles on the edges, but the area will be about right. Then we start in the middle and spiral out."

Andy nodded. "We still need to find an expert."

"I have some leads on that," Nile said. "While you were asleep, I used the hotel wifi to do some research. There are whole publicly traded companies that do this stuff – exactly what you're looking for." Nile gave them a rundown of what she'd found and that she'd already taken the initiative to set up a burner email address (whatever that was) and send general inquiries.

Joe said, "We can go to the university tomorrow and see what they have for maps of the ocean floor." He looked to Nile. "Can you come?"

"Yeah, sure." She looked surprised to be asked.

Andy shot a look at Nicky, who nodded smoothly, but without the warm affirmation of 'you're coming with _us_ '. It was instead more a 'you're going with _him_ ' thing. "So you're trading off. Nicky's my babysitter tomorrow?"

They looked uneasily between one another. Nicky said diplomatically, "One of us will stay with you at all times."

"I don't _need_ that."

"Of course not," Joe lied, straight-faced and yet somehow still endearingly obvious that it wasn't the truth.

Andy laughed and then winced, putting her hand over her side. "Okay, point made," she conceded. "And I assume it's Joe the day after that?"

"I'll need someone to help me with the maps," Joe said in the same tone. This time there were crinkles around the corners of his eyes. "Nicky and Nile can handle whatever feedback we have from the companies. Reaching out to them if they have not yet reached out to us."

She nodded. "Okay. Just … in Merrick's tower, you guys made protecting me the highest priority. Eventually it meant we stopped progressing toward our target. We don't do that again. We keep making progress. We're not leaving Quynh down there. Not now that we know she's still there." They nodded in sober agreement. " _She_ is the highest priority."


	4. Doctor's Orders

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> An element of canon handwavium: the ocean should have corroded the iron maiden enough so Quynh could escape several hundred years ago. Obviously that didn't happen in canon, so it didn't happen in my story either.

The door shut behind Joe and Nile as they left for the university. Nicky turned to Andy. She cut him off before either of them could pretend everything was fine. "My head hurts and my throat is sore. I think I'm sick." She spoke in Italian, the modern version, which was his (current) favorite language.

He breathed out slowly and answered in the same tongue. "I will make you tea." He came to her, putting his hands lightly on the sides of her face. He kissed her forehead. While he was showing very normal affection, she suspected he was also checking her for fever. She didn't think she had one, but the only times she'd ever felt what might have been a fever was the downside of certain drug highs. She wasn't sure if they were the same for sickness.

"You don't mind?" She searched his face. He didn't seem newly concerned, so she assumed her temperature was acceptable. She hated how unsure she was of her own body.

"I don't mind." He smiled and went to put the kettle on one of the two burners in the kitchenette.

"Nicolo," she said with mock-drama, "I am going to get old and feeble and useless if I don't die of something else before then."

"I don't mind that, either," he called, going through the cabinet to see what choices they had for tea.

" _I_ mind it."

He chuckled softly. "Do you remember those hounds we had, Yusuf and I, in Egypt?"

"The pharaoh hounds? Yes."

"Their names were … they translate as Runner and Brown. Maybe Racer and Tawny? Every evening when the weather was fair, we would take them to the dunes. They would chase the hares and sometimes the birds. I would read a book. Yusuf would sketch or hunt mussels or swim. When he wanted to paint, we took a cart for the easel and paints, and sometimes we'd take dinner with us as well. When the dogs got older, they'd jump in the cart and we'd pull them to the beach.

"Eventually, we had to lift them into the cart. They didn't run so much those days. Instead, they would lie next to me while I read. They would admire the scenery and scent the wind, barking if there was anything they needed to tell me about."

Andy watched as he smiled wistfully and leaned against the counter. "They were good dogs," he said. "I loved them. The opportunity to show that as they aged and needed me more, was never something I minded. I cherished it."

She smiled back, feeling herself tear up, especially at the implication to herself. She had passed out of the category of eternal companion and into that of someone he intended to take care of for the rest of her limited days. She wondered if his steadiness would falter when she died. She hoped not. She didn't want to be the cause of that. "Do you remember Coffee Bean?"

"Hm." He was silent for a bit. "The horse you had in … the 1400s?"

She nodded. "I had her mother and arranged the breeding, so I had her from a foal. I trained her myself. She was soft in the mouth and so careful with her feet, steady as a rock and forever attentive to me. She made me remember things I hadn't thought about for thousands of years. She made me remember a horse wasn't just a tool, but a person."

Andy chuckled. "It's funny. This language doesn't even support what I'm trying to say. I can't think of one we share that does. Have things changed so much?"

"I understand you."

She nodded and accepted that. "She lived to be twenty-three. Such a short time, but I still remember her. No other horse has been the same." She swallowed around the lump in her throat. "At the end, it was just her and me. Quynh had gone on to Bombay, or whatever they call it now. Mumbai, I think. She wasn't going to stay for some horse who was too old to make the trip." She smirked at how they'd both thought it would be the mare's final winter. "Bean lasted three more years at pasture.

"And Quynh would send me these jealous letters …" She laughed dryly at how indignant Quynh had been that Andy had chosen to stay with her aging horse rather than visit Bombay with her. "I think if it had been a stallion, she would have taken matters into her own hands and hurried the end along." But Quynh had been in Bombay and Andy had not budged, no matter what the letters threatened.

Nicky brought over her tea. She told him, "Thank you." He took a seat at the table as she went on. "She started off as bay, but by then she was solid white and still beautiful to me. I mean, she was old. She sagged. She had a scar across her belly from that asshole along the Po River. But she was beautiful still, because I knew her for who she was. And she still loved me."

Now she did tear up. Andy sniffed and put her face into her hands, her eyes wet. The scented steam of the black tea rose up around her. "I'm so glad I didn't go to Bombay. Even if it was just a stupid horse."

"That's Quynh speaking. Not you. She was not just a stupid horse."

"No, she wasn't," Andy said, lifting her face. "She wasn't the smartest horse I've known, but she wasn't stupid."

"And she wasn't 'just'. She was a person, as you said. One you loved."

She smiled at him. "Thank you. I did. And I still do. Six hundred years later." She wiped her eyes. "Well. No matter how old I get, I hope you know I love you. I always will. You and Yusuf and Sebastien, too. Make sure he knows that, if I don't get to tell him."

"I do. And I will."

"What did you do with the dogs? After?"

"We put them in the cart. The one, and then later the other. We buried them at the dunes." He repeated, "The one, and then later the other."

She nodded. "Burn me. Ashes to the sea. So I'll be with her in the end." He nodded solemnly in return. "Enough with this morbid shit, though." Andy sipped the tea, feeling it hot on her throat and easing the pain. "Don't tell them I talked about this. They don't need to know."

"I cannot agree." He said it simply, in the same tone that he'd used for agreeing to tell Sebastien that she loved him.

She snorted. "Of course not." She was a fool for even asking it. He wouldn't keep a word secret from Joe. She wished there was a way to protect them from having to deal with her inevitable frailties. But they weren't going to leave her anymore than she'd left her horse. Asking them to do so was like Quynh trying to order her to get her ass to Bombay like she'd promised (she'd promised to come after Bean passed; they just both assumed that would be before the next spring). "Tell me one thing, though. Did you three coordinate this – taking turns watching over me?"

He shook his head. "Joe and I coordinated. Nile came to the same conclusion herself. She is wise." Andy rolled her eyes, but she didn't dispute it. Nicky leaned forward, focusing his full and impressive intensity on her. "Now. Tell me your symptoms."

* * *

Joe and Nile returned late in the day with maps, copies of maps, art supplies, books, a few changes of clothes, and some snack food. By then, Andy couldn't have hidden she was sick if she'd tried. Her nose was stopped up and the headache was bad, kept from being terrible solely by the painkillers Copley had sent with them. She wondered why the antibiotics weren't doing any good, but she wasn't a doctor.

Nicky wasted no time in describing her weakness and his intention that something had to be done.

"People survive these things all the time, Nicky," Andy told him.

"And sometimes people do not," he said back. "It is not a risk I will take with your life."

Joe tilted his head. "We have no idea what happens when someone loses their immortality. You've only seen it happen _once_ and he died. Immediately. Are you … vulnerable to everything now?"

"I hope you're joking," she said, but despite her bravado, what if he was right? What if Lykon would have died in a few days even if he hadn't been stabbed in the gut? Was that what was happening to her? She'd assumed she had years. What if she only had days?

"I don't think he is," Nile said seriously. "You probably need to be vaccinated against everything. There might be pollens in the air now that didn't even exist when you were last mortal, much less thousands of years of evolution of bacteria and viruses to contend with. We need to have you see a proper doctor. I do not want to be responsible for letting the oldest person ever in the world die because we thought a little Nyquil was all you needed."

"What's Nyquil?" Joe asked.

"It's a cough medicine in the US," Nile told him. "I don't know if they have it in Europe. But it's for minor stuff you can sleep off." He nodded. It wasn't like any of them spent their time hanging out in pharmacies getting familiar with brand names. When she'd been stabbed, Andy hadn't even been sure which packages had the sort of bandages she needed.

Nicky said to Joe, "There was that doctor we worked with in Congo. Fournay. She knows we heal. She's never told anyone. She might know someone trustworthy who's close."

"That doctor Merrick had seemed to know her shit," Andy said, partly to be a pain in the ass, but then again, partly serious. Nicky shot her an annoyed look for her suggestion. She explained, "We wouldn't have to hide anything with her." Not that they'd have to hide much with Fournay, either, but she didn't know about some unknown colleague.

"What happened to that doctor in the lab, anyway?" Nile asked.

"You knocked her down," Joe said. "She stayed on the floor and out of the way while we armed. She probably crawled away later. She's fine, most likely. But we're not taking Andy to her."

"No," Nile said. "I didn't think so."

Andy rolled her eyes, which hurt. Why the fuck were _her eyes_ sore? "Lost opportunity."

Nicky said, "I'll see if I can get in touch with Dr. Fournay." He went to the hotel phone, but for the moment only stared at it.

"There are going to be questions," Andy said. She coughed wetly, hating the weird feeling at the back of her throat. Both Joe and Nicky looked at her in unconcealed alarm, like she was about to drop dead right in front of them. Only Nile acted unbothered. It was a normal sound for a sick person to make. Andy wondered if this whole mortality thing was going to be rougher on Joe and Nicky than it was on her.

"We will answer the questions," Nicky said tensely, going back to the phone when she swallowed down the next cough, refusing to let it surface. He dialed the front desk.

When it became clear what he was trying to do in connecting to someone who was very likely on another continent, Nile jumped in to help with the laptop and a few searches. Those turned up numbers that she could dial given the account changes Copley had made to her phone. Within an hour, Fournay had given them the name of someone within driving distance. Shortly after that, Andy had an appointment for the next morning.

"This is ridiculous," she grumbled. She didn't want all the attention they were giving this. She wasn't comfortable being the one they were taking care of. But she couldn't figure out how to deny it without denying their undeniable love and concern for her. It was touching, sure, but irritating as hell.

"It's very serious," Nicky said after a beat.

"It's seriously ridiculous," she said back. He smiled at her.

"At least you still have your sense of humor," Joe said. He smiled as well, but behind their smiles was worry.

* * *

She didn't tell them anything about what the doctor had said until they were back inside the car, which served them right for overreacting to the point that even _she'd_ been scared. "I'm fine." Nicky and Joe both gave her doubting looks. "Really. It's a normal cold and probably seasonal allergies. He should know. He tested me for everything under the sun. I lost track of how many shots they gave me."

That was not true, but when they'd done humanitarian aid projects, the kids had only been given two shots at most – combi-shots – and she didn't want to worry Joe, Nicky, or Nile with the true number of injections she'd been given or blood draws she'd gone through. Among other things, it was (somewhat) hypocritical of her to have allowed this after Merrick's, but in this case her life was theoretically on the line, she was making the decision only for herself (she hoped), and she'd been allowed to walk out whenever she liked.

The whole thing worried and unsettled her enough that she was willing to say almost anything to make sure it didn't happen again. Fortunately, most of what she had to say was true. "They won't even have all the results back until next week. He said the gut shot was healing fine. I have the tip of a farrier's nail in my left foot and he said I'd broken my hand in two places."

"Now?" Joe gave her hands an alarmed look. He was in the driver's seat. She was in the front passenger seat. Nile and Nicky were in the back. He hadn't started the car moving yet. "When did that happen?"

She laughed, winced about her side, then coughed and winced again for the same reason. "No. When I was a child." She had absolutely no memory of that, but she didn't remember when she'd stepped on a nail, either. Obviously, she'd only managed to get part of it out of herself before it healed over. She assumed it couldn't have been too long ago or else her body would have absorbed it by now. Maybe in the last thousand years? How long did it take the body to dissolve iron? How long did it take the ocean?

She pulled her thoughts away from that. "I asked him if I'd broken any other bones. He said no." Which was also funny, because she had not a bone that hadn't been broken. That avalanche had done it if nothing else had. Or the time that statue had fallen on her (which had totally been Lykon's fault). "He liked my teeth. Everything is fine."

"You're just trying to reassure us," Joe said. He turned to Nicky. "We should go in and talk to him."

"Hey!" Andy raised her voice, causing both men to snap their heads toward her. "I _am_ trying to reassure you. And I'm telling the truth. You're not going in and talking to him. You either trust me, or you don't." She let her voice make it the ultimatum it was and kept herself from coughing by sheer force of will.

"Yes, boss," Nicky said immediately. Joe exhaled and started the car. She stared at his profile, waiting for his agreement. He nodded a few times without looking at her, but with him that was good enough.

She turned to Nile, who was politely keeping her mouth shut. "He said I could take Nyquil if I could find it. He'd heard of it." She made as small a cough as she could manage.

Nile hesitated to be sure of the emotional tone in the car (Joe pulled out the space and they left the parking lot). Then she chuckled. "I'm sure there's a local equivalent we can find. Are those your records?" She gestured at the packet of paperwork Andy was carrying.

She handed them back. "Read 'em and don't weep too much. I told them to send the test records to that hotel down the street from ours, assuming we're still in the city in a week."

"Why-" Nile started, then said, "Oh. In case they come searching for you or something?"

"Exactly. All we have to do is slip the day manager some money to hang onto it for us."

"Hm." Nile went back to the records. "Do you need booster shots?"

"What are those?" Weren't they part of the vaccine regimen?

"I … don't know," Nile said distractedly. "Let me read this." Nicky was reading over her shoulder. Andy wondered if and when Nile would notice that and work out what it implied.

"Well, then," Joe said. "We'll make sure we're still at the hotel in a week."

"We wasted a day on this," Andy grumbled, still turned so she could see everyone in the car. Mainly she was watching Nicky's expression as he scanned the records Nile was slowly flipping through. He didn't look too concerned, which was a relief to see.

"Better safe than dead," Nile said. "You have the same blood type as I do."

"Do I?"

"Yeah." Nile pulled out her dog tags and rattled them. "AB positive. It's not one of the common ones, but it's not the rarest, either." She looked to Nicky. "Do you know what yours is?"

"Is there a C? Maybe it was C. Joe, do you think it was C?"

Nile blinked at him a couple times. "Huh. Yeah, okay, never mind." Apparently, she would not yet notice what it implied. Andy smirked to herself as Nile went back to reading.

"I think it was S for smartass," Joe said with a glance over his shoulder. Nicky flashed him a brief smile.

Andy looked back to Nicky, "What happened while I was in there?"

Nicky said, "We have a teleconference with a company tomorrow."

Nile added, "And we need to get the Rodin verified. There's a company in France that does that. They'll meet with me Friday, but I'll have to take the statue to them. They liked the pictures."

Andy looked to Joe, who said, "I have the maps ready. You should review them."

She nodded. "Is there anything else we can do today for Quynh?"

Joe shrugged. Nile said, "Get some rest?"

"Do you feel like you need it?"

Nile hesitated. "Not really. I was talking about _you_."

Andy sighed. She'd known that. She just didn't want to admit it. "The three of you should train together. When Copley comes through with a job, we need to be ready." She looked back at Nile. "You have a good grasp of the basics, but we're still going to start there." She stopped to cough. Good medical results be damned, she still felt awful.

Joe said firmly, "If you do not rest, we do not train."

In the natural pause between his words and her response, Andy had a second to consider his meaning. He was making an ultimatum of his own. He was challenging her, which didn't happen often from him or Nicky. If she treated it like a challenge, then they would have a genuine fight. This was neither the time nor the subject for her insecurity and ego to take center stage. She gave a theatrical groan and rolled her eyes (which still hurt). "Fine. I'll rest."


	5. Healing

Joe sat down next to her after she was settled into bed. The others had gone to scout locations for training. A large conference room would do for now, if they could move the tables out of the way. He said, "Nicky is very important to me."

She looked at him with mock surprise. "Is he?"

Joe grinned. "No, it is true! He is. I know it might be hard to tell …?" He lifted his brows in question.

"I did not know!" she said in amazement, continuing the act. She'd been expecting him to approach her – they clearly had unsettled business about who was in charge of things. Humor was a good tactic. She had to hand that to him.

"After all this time you did not? That is terrible!" They both laughed and this time her side didn't hurt abominably, nor did she cough. She leaned back and smiled welcomingly. Even after most of a millennia, it was still charming to hear how much they thought of each other.

But as she suspected, Joe hadn't come to talk about his love for Nicky. "And so when I think about you and Quynh, I think about Nicky and I. If he were suffering, I would trade places with him in a heartbeat. If we were parted, I would not rest until he was returned to me. If anyone stood between us, I would strike them down without mercy or hesitation."

Andy's brows twitched up and she nodded shallowly.

Joe said, "I know you are pushing yourself hard because of your love for her. But the only way you get her back is if you are alive when we find her." He shook his head. "Otherwise, there is no reunion. I will not stand by idly while you destroy yourself. None of us will."

She looked at him. "I've noticed," she said dryly.

"Promise me that you will be careful," he asked. He folded his hands in front of him and leaned toward her with those irresistible, soulful eyes of his. Seriously – she understood why Nicky could deny him nothing. He was holding nothing back here. "Promise me that you will let yourself heal. And in return, I promise you that we will do all we can to find Quynh, as quickly as possible."

She placed her hands over and below his, holding them firmly and meeting his gaze in the old way. "I promise that."

His expression turned sad and then concerned. He switched to holding her nearer hand in his. "I fear for you. I fear for us without you. I fear the pain we will feel in your passing and that fear gives me dread for when the time comes. It is such a short time that you have remaining." He sounded heart broken. His eyes were wet.

She smiled gently. "Maybe fifty years. A lot of people don't get even that." Of course, she might die tomorrow, but she left that unsaid.

"You are not a lot of people. You are Andromache the Scythian, who claims not to remember her own name." He paused. "Do you remember it?"

She laughed lightly. "Why do you want to know? You've asked so many times now."

"I want to memorialize you properly."

She snorted. "It doesn't matter." He gave her a short scowl. "It doesn't," she insisted. "Remember me as the person you've known, not a name I don't even call myself."

He sighed. "This thing that happened to you – it is so monstrous. Booker-"

"Booker didn't do this to me," she interrupted. Joe regarded her silently. She was still holding his hand. She gave it a squeeze. "He shot me," she continued, "And he sold us out, but he didn't do this to me. This happened on its own."

"When?"

She exhaled heavily. They really hadn't had a chance to talk about this – not about the details. He deserved to know. His greatest fear was no secret – that he and Nicky would be parted by the death of one of them. "I think it was when I introduced Nile to the three of you in Goussainville. Not that it had anything to do with her, but that's when it happened. Dinner tasted off. I was tired. I finished off the vodka, but I was sore and I didn't want to sleep. I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin."

He nodded once, eyes distant. "That was when. So it was not at Copley's, when you were taken?"

She shook her head. "In Goussainville, I didn't know what I was feeling. Later, I realized." She decided to skip mention of the stab wound on her shoulder, which had miraculously gone unnoticed by them so far. It was one less thing for them to fuss over. The doctor had said it was fine and that it would give her a nifty scar. "It wasn't until I was shot that it mattered."

"Someday Nicky and I will follow you," Joe said slowly, after a long pause. His voice was quieter and gravely sober. "It is good to hear there is some warning to the change. Your description with Lykon made it sound so sudden. It terrifies me every time I see Nicolo die."

"Lykon might have felt the same as I did. He just didn't have my benefit of being able to look back and dissect it." Nor had she had the opportunity to talk to him about it. His departure from her life had been jarringly quick. Joe and Nicky had time to think about her end. While Nicky seemed to have already found peace with it, she hoped Joe didn't torment himself too much over it.

He nodded.

She changed the subject. "By the way, you should tell Nicky to stop being such a little shit with Nile. I don't think she's figured it out yet with him."

Joe chuckled. He gave her hand a quick squeeze before letting it go and leaning back. "She will, boss. If Nile figures him out herself, it will be special. If she is told, it will not be. Besides, Nicky missed his chance to do this with Booker. Let him have this. He's enjoying himself."

"Hm." Andy considered that, considering also his attempt to casually drop in 'boss' to signal his feelings on their relationship – having extracted her word from her, he was dropping his challenge and literally backing off. "Okay," she agreed. "I'll hold my tongue."

* * *

Days passed. She got over the cold. The surface of the gunshot wound healed over, but the deeper tissues were still on the mend. They made a tentative contract with a deep sea recovery company, outlining their need to recover one particular iron maiden with a very approximate location. It was a strange request, but they were the ones paying.

Joe, Nicky, and Nile took turns doing basic drills, renting an event room at the hotel when there were no competing reservations. Nile had a surprising degree of patience with the work – far more than Booker had had. Nile talked about it just being more training, same thing she'd been doing in the military. Booker had hated the military, whereas she reflected on it as an important element of her identity.

The drills were important on several levels, but the one Andy thought most important in the wake of her failing with Booker was in integrating Nile with the group. Nile needed to learn their moves and their fighting styles – not necessarily so she could replicate them, but so she was familiar. So she knew what to expect. So she understood what they were capable of and where she fit into the team.

Booker had never had that, which Andy saw now. He'd joined them after more than a century of life after his first death. It had taken them quite a while to realize he didn't have a warrior bone in his body. Despite having been in an army, he had no more combat skills than the average bureaucrat. When they had tried to train him, he'd been balky, stubborn, and proud – a pain in the ass to deal with, so much that they hadn't kept at it. His skills had been gained slowly over decades and more often from the mortals they'd worked with than from Joe, Nicky, or herself.

She wasn't going to make the same mistakes with Nile. Even if she was convalescing, Andy still kept a close eye on developments. She nudged conversations, encouraged disclosures, and made points about Nile's contributions. Maybe it was Nile's military background or her family situation from before (or both), but the young woman had a good grip on the concept of teamwork. She took to it well.

Weeks passed. The deeper tissues of the gunshot wound knitted together. They rented a garage in walking distance so the others could train more rigorously. Andy began exercising again (alone) and watched as the others progressed into light sparring.

There was an element of this that involved keeping their skills sharp. Immortals didn't forget things as fast as mortals, but they still forgot. It was easy to skip practice for months or years and suddenly realize you couldn't recall entire sections of previously rock-solid skillsets. So there was that as a reason for the sparring, but it was also a continuation of the drills from before – getting a shared foundation with one another and coming together as a team.

The muscle memory she was trying to build in them was to stick together, fall in together, know where each other was in formation, and know each other well enough to handle a chaotic combat situation. Someday Nile would be leading them. To get there, she needed this blood, sweat, and tears – gaining respect, earning it, in both directions.

They could train hard because they never had to worry about any injuries inflicted. Andy had cut herself with a knife while chopping vegetables and separately burned herself on a pan, both of which took _days_ to heal (and an equal amount of time to convince them to let her in the kitchen again). Also, her joints ached for no reason at times and she developed a crick in her neck from lying down 'wrong'. She wondered how long it would take before her resentment toward her new fragility faded.

But aside from that, the Rodin was verified. Ownership of it was transferred. The contract with the deep sea recovery company was finalized and signed. The agreed-upon ship was scheduled and dispatched. It would still be months before it finished its current assignment and arrived for theirs. Andy was metaphorically champing at the bit, but Quynh had already waited five hundred years. They were moving as fast as they could.

She turned down the first job Copley recommended to them. The team wasn't ready. Nile's training had been expanded to Italian language interspersed with stories and history lessons. She trained them in turn on elements of the modern world they'd previously left Booker to handle – mainly computers and phones.

Andy missed him. From time to time, Joe or Nicky said something that told her they missed him as well. Their missing him co-existed with their resentment about the whole thing with Merrick. Andy found she didn't resent that, even knowing he'd misled her into thinking Quynh was gone for two hundred years. She was just tired about it. She'd made mistakes she didn't know if she'd ever have a chance to fix.

Every time Nile kicked her in her sleep trying to escape or woke gasping in the middle of the night or looked hungover in the morning despite being stone cold sober 24/7 or mentioned that showers bothered her now … Andy had to remember Booker had dealt with that far longer, masking it with drunkenness and depression. He hadn't joined them full-time until the 1930s, by which time he'd had more than a century to hide it. She didn't want that to happen to Nile, but the nightmares came anyway. Every one was a knife to Andy's gut. If they found Quynh, they'd stop.


	6. From the Mouth of Babes

Andy warmed up because she thought she ought to. It was a thing normal people did. When she'd trained others (the normal sort of others), she'd always provided time for it. Horses needed it. Dogs needed it. She assumed she did as well, now. So while Joe coached Nile and Nicky on the freestyle takedown drill, she stretched and went through an abbreviated version of her usual exercises.

When she felt loose and ready, she called out. "Joe." He looked over. "I'm with you."

He hesitated and looked over at her with slightly too wide of eyes. He looked back to Nicky and Nile. "Just keep doing that." He walked over to Andy.

"Same thing they're doing," Andy said. She'd been taking it easy long enough.

Joe nodded slowly and took up a position in front of her. She settled herself, remembering the rhythm of this particular drill. The goal was simple: throw the other person on the ground. No strikes, no kicks, and as little wrestling as possible. It was about balance and leverage, but there was also a huge component that relied on reading your opponent. To her mind, this made it a good exercise to start with, given her limitations.

Joe didn't put his hands on her first, so she initiated. He was stiff with part of his attention still on Nicky and Nile. She waited until Nile made an outraged noise, drawing his attention even more. Then she pulled one of Joe's hands, pivoted, and executed a perfect hip toss, throwing him over her body. Once he was off the ground and going, she slowed the move and pulled the toss so he hit more gently than was necessary. She pulled him back up after he'd landed.

He smirked, rolled his shoulders, and moved into position again. This time his hands were up and his focus was on her. They battled back and forth with neither gaining advantage, but part of that was Joe failing to follow up on the opportunities that came his way. He was holding back. When he lunged for her, she stepped out of the way and tripped him as he passed.

He got to his feet licking his lower lip. He wiped it with the back of his hand, leaving a small smear of blood. The floor of the garage was bare concrete, stained with oil and now in a few places from their various sparrings, spots of blood. Too many protections gave a person bad habits in the field. As a necessity of training for regular humans? Sure. For them? No. But he wasn't seeing her as one of 'them' anymore. Maybe that was why he didn't want to put her to the floor.

"Try harder," she said with an edge to her voice. His eyes narrowed and his chin came up in defiance. She gave him a tired look. "Try harder or I'll spar with _Nile_ , instead." That worried him. She could see it.

Behind her, Nile chirped eagerly, "Yeah? That sounds great. I'm up for that!"

"No," Joe said, his worry deepening. "You shouldn't-"

But Andy had already turned her back on him, striding over to where Nile had separated from Nicky. Over her shoulder, she said to Joe, "I've fulfilled the promise." There had been no time limit to it, but she interpreted it as when she was done healing. That was now. If he wanted to object, this was the time for him to do so. Andy hooked a thumb at Nicky, wordlessly telling him to get lost. He backed off without argument.

"Round two, here I come," Nile said.

Andy grinned at her. Finally, a challenge. She squared off, trying to remember the one and only time she'd fought Nile in that plane. Nile grinned back, moving in too close to loosely grip the underside of Andy's elbows. Andy let her have the underhook and the proximity, but a flash of cold passed over her. It wasn't that she was afraid, or even concerned, but she didn't know Nile's tells, the signals she'd relied on with Joe.

"Nile," Joe said, "be careful with her!"

"Trust her," Nicky said simply, and Andy wondered if he was talking about her or Nile.

Nile gripped and pushed and Andy didn't know if it was a feint or real. She braced herself, pushing back, only to have Nile yank her forward and over an extended leg, tumbling her to the floor. She rolled out of it, reflexes protecting her just as always. Her knee hurt, but otherwise the throw had been textbook enough and moderated the same way Andy had done with Joe to avoid hurting him. She laughed as she stood up – no help from Nile in that. Nile was watching her with a deep amusement. Andy's smile broadened. Joe made concerned clucking noises. Nicky shushed him.

She flexed her knee. It was fine. She engaged again, letting her center of balance drop, letting herself root to the floor in a metaphorical way. Nile tried the same thing again, but over the other leg. Andy swayed, sidestepped, and moved with it, untoppled. The confidence on Nile's face faltered.

They exchanged pushes and attempts as Andy catalogued her opponent's style. Nile overcommitted a lot. She remembered that from the airplane fight, too. She'd heard Joe and Nicky both criticizing her over the past weeks for over-muscling moves instead of learning the proper technique. Even though she wasn't as prone to it now as she had been weeks ago, it was still a tendency.

Andy let her have the underhook again. It was the most dominant position easily obtained given their positions, so it made sense that Nile kept going for it. But taking it meant she'd limited her options, giving Andy fewer moves to worry about. She next time Nile over-muscled her pull, Andy followed the motion. She stepped forward right into Nile, flush from hip to breast (and this was where if they'd been really fighting, she would have head-butted her), and took her down with an inside trip and a snapping thrust of her hips.

Nile made a surprised sound as she landed on her butt. "That's … rude!"

"Use your pelvis more. It's where most of your strength is. Men have it in their upper body, but unless you're a man, don't play a man's game. We have it in our ass, so use it." Nile got to her feet and chuckled. Andy added, "It's no different than a shoulder check. You've just been socialized not to do it."

"Show me that, then," Nile said.

They went through it slowly, one of them initiating and then the other, discussing the fine points of foot position and timing. Andy said, "None of this would have worked if you hadn't surrendered your balance by overcommitting to trying to pull me out of place. It only works if your opponent does that."

"Like this?" Nile gripped and pulled. Andy went with it and stepped into her, bumping Nile back and off-balance, but without the trip to knock her down. Nile nodded. "Okay. I really gotta quit doing that."

Andy nodded, letting her learn her own lessons. They stopped after an hour of what Andy considered very light sparring. She wasn't sure what her body could handle, but she intended to start small. And learn her own lessons.

They sat together on opposite ends of their big plastic ice chest as Andy downed half a bottle of water. Joe and Nicky were doing something that involved footwork and lunges. She watched them idly, thinking about the days when she would have trained with them until she got bored or hungry rather than having to take one hour baby steps like this. There was nothing in her thousands of years of memory that matched with these bizarre limitations she found herself saddled with. She took another drink, adding to her mental list of grievances that this was water instead of vodka.

Nile said, "Um. So. I missed my period last month."

Andy snorted. "Oh. Yeah. You're not going to have those anymore." Andy hadn't had one either, something she hoped was a permanent feature of her returned mortality, but time would tell. Months earlier, the doctor had asked the date of her last menstrual period. 'I dunno, Doc, the end of the Stone Age?' She'd lied, but it still made her smile.

"I'm not?" Nile asked. Andy shook her head, focusing on the present. Nile asked, "Can I have kids?"

"Have whatever kids you want." Andy took another drink. "They won't be the product of your body, though. You could ask Booker about that one, too."

"He … Wait, were those not his kids?"

"I told him it wasn't when the first one happened, but he didn't believe me. Of course, he didn't believe he was immortal, either, and it took us years to convince him. That's part of why I shot you right away." Andy shook her head. "I didn't want to argue with you for the next half century over stupid shit. You were easier to convince than he was. He's a very stubborn man."

"Oh." Nile blinked at her. "Did he … ever believe you – about the kids, that is?"

"Yeah. The second one didn't look anything like him. The first one was at least close." She laughed. "But it didn't matter to him. He claimed them. They were his. After the second one, he _did_ stop arguing the point." She tipped her bottle at Nile like a victory toast.

"He told me he had three sons."

"He did. Third one came later. Second family."

"How many families did he have?"

"Just the two. Didn't learn his lesson the first time. Like I said: stubborn."

"And by then he knew that wasn't his son?"

"He was the father. He just wasn't the," she looked for the right word in English, "sire." That didn't seem right, but it was close enough.

"That's kind of sweet."

"He has his good points." Andy took another swig. "I went through a phase of adopting orphans. It's hard when you can't provide them the sort of clan or family ties they need in society. Plus the aging thing. I found it easier to support orphanages. They last longer and help more kids than I ever could by myself. If you want kids, there's no shortage of them out there. But I don't recommend it."

"No, I … I'm okay without kids. My family plans weren't real solid anyway." She was silent for a while. "So … I could just have sex with anyone, then, couldn't I? I can't even get an STD."

Andy wondered if _she_ could get one now. That was a disappointing thought, not that she had any prospects lined up, healed or not. But she laughed dryly for Nile's benefit. "Anyone who wants you, yeah."

Nile gave her a side-eye and playfully bumped Andy's shoulder. "Are you saying you think I'd have trouble getting it if I wanted it?"

Andy gave her an easy grin. "No, I'm not saying that." She gave Nile's profile an appraising look. Nile was definitely attractive. If things were different, she wouldn't think twice about bedding her. But she was new, she was a team member, and there was the matter of Quynh. She turned away.

"Hmp," Nile grunted, having seen the look and seeming happy about it. If Nile noticed the melancholy that followed it, she didn't show it. Nile said, "Everyone other than other immortals is eventually going to be so … young, aren't they? Do you ever …?" She gave a telling look to finish the sentence.

"With non-immortals?" Andy asked. Nile nodded. "Not often," Andy said. "I _have_. It's just-" She shrugged at the pointlessness of such. "At best it's like scratching an itch. At worst …" She grimaced.

"Were you and Quynh … together?"

Andy nodded, noticing how much of Nile's conversation had gone non-verbal for this topic. "And Lykon. I've been with Booker. Never Joe or Nicky, for obvious reasons." Nicky had a sword out and was using it to demonstrate something to a skeptical-looking Joe, repeating the lunge motions from earlier. Andy recognized the move. She'd showed it to Nicky some years back.

It was best with a war spear, but his two-handed straight sword was a passable substitute if you caught an opponent off-guard enough that the extra leverage the spear provided wasn't necessary. She wasn't sure it would work with the curved one-handed blades Joe favored and from the way Joe was standing, he didn't either. Well, it _would_ work, there were just better fighting styles to be used. She finished her bottle and swiped a nearby towel to wipe the sweat from the back of her neck, making a mental note to mention this to Nicky later. If she remembered.

"Wait, you were with Booker?"

Andy nodded. "A few times."

"Didn't work out?"

"It worked out enough to do it more than once. He was lonely. So was I. It's a comfortable thing to do with someone, to bring them pleasure. But I didn't yearn for him and he knew that. It disappointed him, so we stopped. I haven't yearned for anyone since Quynh except Achilles."

"Who?"

"The short version is he's a man I fell in love with in Australia in the 1780s. We lived together until he was in his sixties. He wanted to split then and I'd started dreaming of Booker." She grimaced. "Booker was just the straw that broke the camel's back on that one."

"Did you … have a family?"

"We were together."

"But you were never 'together' with Booker? You just slept with him a few times?"

Andy frowned at the imprecision of the euphemisms and the difficulty of compressing two hundred years into a few words. "Yeah," she said curtly.

Nile was quiet for several beats. "So … do you think that had anything to do with him betraying the group like that?"

"What?"

"You and him not hitting it off?"

Andy stared at her, seeing the dots Nile had connected, but refusing to acknowledge there was a connection. Nile just didn't have the context, that was all. "The last time was decades ago. We're adults. And even if he was the youngest of us before you, he's an adult, too. He wouldn't do that."

"You're the one who said he was stubborn."

Andy looked at her, disquieted by the possibility, recognizing that her own reluctance to give the idea some air was a problem. Was this an 'out of the mouth of babes' situation, or was Nile seeing something that wasn't there? Nile had barely seen them interact. Was this such a common human pattern that an attentive person would see it anywhere, and the years had blinded Andy to it? She hadn't seen the betrayal coming, which meant she hadn't been reading him right. How blind was she? Could she afford to ignore Nile's outsider observation?

Nile shrugged and moved on. "Or maybe it was just all that Quynh in his head that caused that."

"Maybe so." She remembered Booker realizing he'd never see her again due to the exile. _That_ had been what hurt him. But the decision was made. And it was stupid to linger on, anyway. She'd think more on it later. For now, she had other priorities. "Have you had dreams of her lately?"

"Nightmares, more like. But yeah. Same ones."

Andy nodded and stood. "Well. Let's go again. I think you'll be a better partner for me than the guys. I don't want to be treated like I'm made of glass."

Nile stood as well. "Before two months ago, everyone I sparred with was like you. And so was I. Did you know the other day Joe actually stabbed me? Right here." She pointed at her ribs.

Andy laughed. "Yeah, you mentioned that. You'll get used to your sparring partners accidentally killing you from time to time. It's a thing."

"Weirdo thing," Nile muttered as they took up positions again in a clear area of floor. "And the weirdest part was I was more offended than hurt. He got the elastic band of my best sports bra!"

"Criminal," Andy deadpanned. She settled and prepared, putting on her game-face. Projections were the deep sea recovery efforts might take years and far more money than the Rodin was worth. If that were the case, they'd have to take jobs for pay. And if _that_ were the case, then she needed to be in shape and able to survive them.


	7. Finders Keepers

_Months later …_

Andy leaned against the ship's rail, watching as the rolling sea of the English Channel rose and fell around her as their rented deep sea exploration ship held position and performed scans at the agreed-upon coordinates. She was trying to remember the first ships she'd ever seen that were worthy of the name. Back then, she had seen them on what was currently called the Caspian Sea. She couldn't remember what her people had called that body of water. Or their ships.

Nile had been quizzing her lately about the distant past, trying to dig up the earliest thing Andy remembered that she was willing to speak of. Willingness wasn't the issue; it was so long ago. She remembered there had been mammoths, for example, but when she tried to bring them to mind, all she saw were the various depictions she'd seen for the last century. The odd thing was she knew there was something wrong with those depictions, but she couldn't describe what it was – something about the shape of the head.

Her whole life before Quynh, before there was anyone there for her to talk to meaningfully, was slippery, ephemeral like a dream. Contrary to what she'd told the others, she knew how long she'd been alive. She and Quynh had sat down and figured it out at one point, some three thousand years ago. Half her lifetime ago – she smirked. At the time, she'd known Quynh less time than Booker had been alive now – one or two centuries, no more.

She supposed she ought to write it down somewhere so that Nile would get her answer one of these days, but for now it was fun to hear her desperate curiosity as she sought after different ways to carbon-date Andy's past. The conundrum was that Andy literally didn't remember it when you went far enough back. Not even simple stuff, like the boats. Not that any of it really mattered aside from Quynh.

She heard Nile's slouching footsteps as she came from belowdecks. The young woman lurched to the rail and clung to it, shoulders sagging.

"You didn't throw up this time," Andy said cheerfully. "You're getting better."

"I haven't eaten yet. I just woke up."

Andy turned, thinking she'd give the usual seasickness advice about food and watching the horizon, but she could see Nile had more to say. In a moment, Nile continued, "I dreamed of her again. But it was different this time." She turned to Andy, her expression drawn and concerned. "She wasn't in that box anymore, the iron maiden. She was floating in the water. I've never seen that before. And I'm pretty sure it's not just something my mind made up, like a normal dream. I think it was where she was. I think she's out of that box."

Andy's stomach had turned to ice. Her chest felt heavy and then light. Adrenaline made her jittery, sending tingles along her fingers in a way no battle had for millennia. "What?"

Nile nodded. "I thought you needed to know."

Andy nodded back to her. "How long has she been out? How long since the last time you dreamed her?" She hadn't been asking daily, or even weekly. She trusted Nile to tell her when it was relevant, as it was now.

"I haven't dreamed her since we were on land. I haven't been able to sleep right on this boat, so just a bit here and there. Days. We know it's not chronological exactly, you know – the dreams. I'm never seeing her as she is right that second."

"I know. But it's close." Andy swung around, looking at the sea spread around them, imagining the search matrix they'd all agreed on. "Finding the maiden isn't going to help us. You said she was floating – on the surface?"

"No. In the water."

"How deep?"

"I don't know. It was dark. The dream was just her. She looked like she was asleep, at peace." Nile shook her head. "Or dead, but I know that's not right. It was just a few seconds, like it usually is."

Andy had to force herself to breathe normally, or a closer approximation to normal. "Was she … well? Physically? All there?" Nile nodded. So sharks weren't eating her, although Andy had been assured modern fishing methods had driven the numbers of that predator so small that they were a tiny fraction of the threat they once were. Given what she'd seen happen to lions and wolves, she believed it. Humans were the only predators left worth worrying about.

Andy looked to the ocean again. "We have to scrap the whole mission. It doesn't matter anymore. We'll need to look for a body washed up … no, she would revive immediately. Just anyone found from the ocean. She won't speak modern languages. She should be easy to find!" Excitement flooded her. They might be days from finding her!

"Tell Joe and Nicky," she directed Nile. "I'll tell the captain."

Nile blanched. "If it's like usual, they wait for me to leave and then …" She shrugged, expressing her reluctance to go back to the shared cabin.

Andy rolled her eyes. "Quynh was their friend, too. Besides, they have fucked right in front of people. There's no reason for them to treat you like a child."

"Uh …" Nile grimaced uncomfortably.

It was hard for Andy to imagine being that callow. "Fine," she said. "I'll tell them. You tell the captain."

* * *

"They don't have a database for 'Found' people like they do for missing ones," Nile said as they settled into their new hotel room in the north of France. Leading the internet search was her job, but they were all going to take part; this was where her earlier lessons to them paid off. "I'm not sure how we even do this. Search the news headlines? Police sites, maybe?"

"It's only France and England," Joe said. "She's not likely to have ended up anywhere else. That limits the municipalities we have to look at."

Andy said, "She could have ended up on a boat. We might have sailed right past her during that storm."

Nicky said, "If she was picked up by a boat, they would bring her to the nearest port. Our search area is the same. She won't be able to speak the language. She has been deeply traumatized. She will stand out. There will be a report. We just have to find it."

Nile asked, "At what point do we bring in Copley to get access to official stuff? The news is easy, but the police stuff isn't always accessible to the public right away."

Joe and Nicky looked at each other, then at Andy. She still didn't trust Copley. What if he found her first, concealed it, and sold her to someone like Merrick? She'd be confused. She might be weak after so long submerged and repeatedly dying. He didn't know Quynh existed. She wanted to keep it that way.

Andy finally said, "I don't want Copley on this. If it takes longer, then it takes longer. Quynh is … free. She'll turn up eventually." The others nodded. "We keep looking," Andy continued, "and if that doesn't work after a few weeks, we have a meeting place in Rome. We go there and wait."

Nile looked unconvinced. "Rome's pretty big."

"The Forum Magnum," Andy told her.

"She'll know to go there?" Nile asked.

Joe explained, "There are places we've agreed to meet if we're separated. It was more important in the past, without telephones. If Nicky and I went somewhere for a few years, we knew where to go to meet Andy and Quynh. And in Europe," he said with a dip of his head, "all roads lead to Rome."

Nile laughed a couple times. "Okay then. I'll remember that. Nicky, you and I are on the English side. Joe and Andy for France."

"No, please," Nicky objected. "France."

"I thought you and Joe didn't like being paired up for training and stuff?" Nile asked.

Joe said, "I'll take England."

Nile looked back and forth between them. Nicky said, "English is a bastard language. I've never learned it."

"You're speaking English right now," Nile pointed out with the tone of someone who didn't want to deal with this level of ridiculous this early in the morning.

"I … have an accent."

"You speak it better than-," Nile stopped herself. "Okay, you know what? Never mind. Joe and I will do England, you and Andy will do France." Andy smiled, proud of Nile for knowing when to let it go. Especially when Nicky was being weird. It had taken Andy way longer to work that one out. Nile said, "Let's get started." They opened their laptops.

* * *

After a week, they had only two leads. One was a woman in England who had assaulted several passers-by near the docks of Plymouth but had disappeared by the time the police arrived. Another was the naked, dead body of a woman found in a culvert near the shore in western France. There were no details available to them for either – the description of the assailant in Plymouth fit Quynh in a broad way (height, weight, long dark hair) but no one noted the language or even if she'd spoken. Ethnicity was blank. They hadn't gotten a good look at her. Which fit Quynh's pattern.

On the other hand, a dead naked body on the opposite side of the English Channel fit Quynh's pattern even better. She'd have needed clothes and the woman had been snatched from a relatively populated area without anyone being the wiser. The corpse was spotted about a day later. The victim fit Quynh as well as the Plymouth agitator – height and weight was a match, so if Quynh was looking for gear, it could have been her.

They'd argued. Or 'discussed'. Nicky and Joe wanted to go in person to Brest, France, canvas the area, see if they could shake loose any information from the police who were doubtless doing an investigation, and send Nile and Andy to check Plymouth, England, interview victims, and see if they could actually find the perpetrator to rule her out as a lead.

"I can't tell you why," Andy said slowly and emphatically, "but it doesn't _feel_ right." She went back to a normal tone. "One of these might be her. But I don't think we're going to get anywhere by chasing her. If she's not making herself known so we _can_ find her, then the only way we'll find her is on her terms. She'll send a signal."

Nile rolled her eyes, sighed, and leaned away from the laptop. "A dead body is not a signal? What kind of signal does she give? Is she where you learned the big explosion signal, or did she get that from you?"

Andy smiled tightly. "We won't miss it when it happens. This isn't it." She gestured at their computers.

Nicky said, "But we could go look. That wouldn't hurt anything."

Andy shook her head. "I'm tired of looking at computer screens, too. But something doesn't feel right. That's all I can tell you. Let's stay together. Let's keep looking. Something will turn up. Or we'll go to Rome and meet her there." She was starting to worry.

* * *

Nile surged off the bed, hurried to the bathroom, and threw up. Andy rolled over and looked around the hotel room. On the other bed, Nicky was half-sitting up, eyes open alertly. His hands were empty. Nile's sudden wakings were routine enough that he didn't come up with a gun as he often had before. Behind him, Joe groaned and rolled over to his back. Nicky relaxed, but didn't go so far as to lie down.

Andy stole Nile's pillow from next to her and pulled herself up, stacking it behind her to prop herself. She and Nile slept in the same bed just as she had once shared the bed with Booker. Nile had never needed to vomit after the dreams, though. "Turn the light on," Andy said quietly. Nicky reached over and did.

They listened as Nile washed her face, rinsed her mouth, and blew out a deep breath. She came back into the room and squared her shoulders. "She has Booker."

"Quynh?" Andy asked, though the answer was obvious. Nicky sat up sharply. Joe followed more slowly.

Nile nodded. "There was blood all over both of them. On the … bed? I think they were on a bed. Something was wrong with his throat. He wasn't happy. She was … waiting?" Her voice caught and she swallowed. "I … I don't know what happened …"

There was silence for a moment as they all pondered the meaning of this. More than any of them, Andy knew what it meant. She'd seen Quynh at her worst. Or, well, she _had_. Before now. It would seem Quynh's worst might have been surpassed. She said, "Call Copley. Have him locate Booker's phone." Nile nodded and moved to her phone. "And Nile?"

"Yeah?" She'd pulled up Copley's contact information.

"This is the signal."

Nile hesitated. "You mean … she's doing this on purpose, to tell us to come get- meet her?" Andy nodded. "How does she know we can locate her with his phone? I thought she didn't know anything from five hundred years ago."

"She's not stupid. She knows I wouldn't be so out of touch with someone, even Book, that I couldn't find him eventually." And Booker – sweet, stubborn, stupid man that he was, hadn't led Quynh to Andy. It would have been better for him if he had. Probably better for all of them.

"What I saw was sick, though." Nile was decisive on that. She dialed. Andy nodded soberly.

Nicky said delicately, "Andy, I think we must prepare for the possibility that she is not well."

"Oh, Nicky …" Her voice turned tired and sad all at once, not the stoic front she'd been keeping up so far. Speaking of sweet men, Nicky thought she needed to be prepared for this? Like she hadn't already realized it? She'd realized this was a possibility nearly five hundred years ago. Sometimes when things were broken, they couldn't be mended. "I don't expect her to be. She might never be again. But we have to go. I have to find her. And Booker doesn't deserve to be part of this."

"No," Nicky said. "He does not."

"Wait a second." Nile put her phone to her chest after talking to Copley and looked to them. "Why didn't she just have Booker _call us_?"

Andy smiled ruefully. "Nile, he's under an exile." She said it gently. She supposed there were things like oaths and exile and meeting places and other customs evolved over centuries that they needed to review with Nile, but right this moment wasn't the time.

Nile gave a tiny shake of her head. "I don't understand. He can't _call us_? There are rules to this? What _are_ the rules to this?"

Nicky explained quietly, "He is not to interact with us at all. Not to initiate contact in any way. If we are to accidentally come across one another, he is to avoid us as soon as he is aware. If we are honorable, we will not put him in a position where he must abrogate the terms. Quynh … has put him in such a position."

"That's stupid," Nile said. "He could dial us and hand her the phone! He doesn't have to-" She lifted her phone back to her ear. "Copley? Yeah, I'm here." Andy sent Nicky a tight smile at Nile's naiveté. The muscle in his jaw jumped as he clenched it. Nile spoke to Copley for a while, wrote information down, and hung up. "Why don't we just call _him_? We know his phone number."

"It's not proper," Nicky said. "We exiled him. We have to live by that as well as he does."

Joe offered, "We do have more leniency than he does, though. We _could_ call. The rules don't account for cell phones."

"It's a form of contact," Nicky said. "If a letter is against the rules, then so is this."

"We don't need to debate this. She wants us to find her," Andy pointed out. She turned to Nile. "Did Copley give you a location?"

"Yeah," Nile said. She opened her laptop. "He gave me coordinates and an estimated address. It's in Paris. Let me pull it up."

"Paris is close enough," Andy said. "We go there. We find Quynh. We get Book out."


	8. Heart Attack

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Perfect art by thatmartiangirl (https://thatmartiangirl.tumblr.com/)! Please let her know how cool it turned out!

Paris was a few hours' drive and the address was not far off the main streets. They arrived mid-morning, with Andy veering to the curb a few blocks from their destination to let a firetruck pass, lights and sirens going. In the passenger seat, Joe leaned to the side and looked up. "That is smoke." He looked back at Nile. "How close are we?"

"It's just up there." She pointed past Andy's shoulder in the direction the firetruck had gone. Their car turned the corner, only for them to see their path to the destination blocked by the same emergency vehicle, now parked sideways across the street. Nile said, "Yeah, great. It's the one that's on fire."

Joe muttered something about the sacred mother of God. From the back seat, Nicky said, "I do not think this is unrelated."

Andy agreed. "Fuck." Her stomach was in a knot of anticipation and apprehension, born of a simple realization that had been growing the entire drive here – Quynh was angry. It wasn't like Andy hadn't known – Nile had said so, repeatedly. But she'd assumed the anger was about the iron maiden. Not, like, about Andy. But Quynh had avoided being found, tortured Booker and made sure Andy knew it, and now was burning everything down. She was really, really angry – at Andy.

Andy remembered all those sailors she'd killed the last time she'd been seriously pissed. She'd hurt people indiscriminately because she was hurting. She'd told herself at the time it was right. Since then she'd doubted. Watching the smoke curl into the sky and feeling the clench in her gut at being made a victim of someone else's misplaced rage, she was sure she'd been wrong.

She turned the wheel, backed up, and got them headed the other way. She hurried the car down a side street and then around, approaching the building from the rear where perhaps they would be able to get closer with fewer witnesses.

Nile asked, "Do you think he got out? He'd be out, right? I mean, what would keep him in there? He'd just keep coming back to life like Quynh did underwater, right?" The tension in her voice was palpable, expressing what all of them were feeling.

Andy had died once by burning at the stake, her body crisped and cooked like a spitted hog. Or so Joe and Nicky had described her state when they'd arrived. She'd long since lost consciousness, although when it returned, it was agony. It was the longest recovery she'd ever had from dying – much longer than being crushed under that statue, longer than growing back both legs. It was like her whole body needed to regenerate and she'd disgustingly sloughed off parts in the process. Death by smoke inhalation or heat was an eyeblink by comparison. She didn't want tell Nile this. She just wanted to get Book out of there before things got too bad for him.

Joe said grimly, "She died underwater. There is something poetic about her arranging to kill him by fire. He must have told her about the betrayal."

Quynh hadn't pulled herself out of a watery grave just to punish a man she'd never met for an offense she didn't even know had happened. And Booker wasn't so socially incompetent to have provoked her. Andy said just as grimly, "I'm the one who was supposed to die by fire. It's a horrible way to go and if he gets trapped under debris in there, then it's going to take a long time to get him out. We have to move fast on this one."

They pulled forward through a wide alley that ran behind the building, with parking on either side of it. Ahead was yet another firetruck, but this one was past the building, not blocking their access. A fireman saw them coming and tried to wave them away. Joe asked Nile, "Do you know which apartment he is in?"

She shook her head. "It's just this address. These coordinates."

Nicky said, "There might be other people in the building as well. We should search the whole thing and help the emergency personnel."

Nile asked, "Do we go in as a team, or do we split up?"

Joe said, "We have to cover as much space as possible. We split up." He smashed his ballcap tight over his head. It would buy his hair a little protection.

"Drop your explosives and electronics," Andy said. "They won't survive the heat."

Joe said, "I'll take that end." He pointed at the far end of the building where the fire was worst. "Nicky, middle. Nile, this end."

"This end isn't on fire at all," Nile pointed out.

"That's what you get for letting me pick," Joe said, getting out of the car and heading off at a jog.

Knowing her presently fragile body wouldn't withstand the heat and smoke, Andy sourly said, "I'll watch the car." Nicky gave her a quick, sympathetic pat on the shoulder as he got out of the car. The fireman was yelling at them. They ignored him, running past him into the burning building. His yells became more frantic. Andy leaned out the window and yelled back at him in Greek, getting his attention.

"Are they with you?" he called. "They can't go in there!"

She responded in Greek, "They're not with me!"

He repeated himself in English. She repeated herself in Russian. He tried a few words of German. She responded in Mandarin. If the situation hadn't been so dire, she would have found this hilarious. He resorted to sign language (and not any of the varieties designed for deaf or hard of hearing persons; he was just energetically waving his arms, trying to direct her out of the alley).

She put the car in reverse. She'd succeeded in distracting him from the others and in fact it would be better if she had the car properly oriented for a quick getaway, should one be called for. She didn't get more than a few car lengths before an ambulance pulled up behind her.

They honked. She gave them some choice hand gestures learned over the course of many years, though she did not off-hand remember if any of them were current in modern France. They got out of their vehicle, their body language indicating that they'd understood her meaning just fine. She got out of hers with a grin that showed her teeth. The fireman, at least, had gone back to firefighting or whatever he was doing. The paramedic told her, "Get that thing out of here!"

She didn't bother with the language charade and answered him in the same French he was speaking. "I _was_ getting it out of here until you got _in_ my way!"

"Get it out of here. That's the law! We could have you arrested. That thing is on fire!" He pointed at the building.

"I see that," she told him, undaunted. "I can't go forward: firetruck. Backwards is you. What do you want here?" She squared up in front of him, hands on her hips and teeth still bared. She couldn't fight the fire or even rescue Book, but she could sure as hell fight this guy.

Directly confronted now, his demeanor changed. He looked around uneasily, then threw up his free hand in exasperation. "You shouldn't be back here!" But he wouldn't look at her as he said it. He had no interest in a real fight. Too bad.

His partner knew it as well and gave him an out. "I'll back up so she can get out. You find the site master." The paramedic went by muttering something insulting under his breath. Andy heard most of it. She let him go. It would be fun to kick his ass, but pointless and counterproductive. She went to her car. The partner backed up the ambulance, pulling it into an even narrower, perpendicular alleyway to get it out of the way. Booker had chosen a really old, rundown district to live in.

Andy backed out. Just as she passed the alley the ambulance was in, she glanced over at a movement. It felt like her heart stopped. Her breathing definitely did.

There was Quynh. Right there.

She was standing on the running board of the ambulance, having just knifed the driver repeatedly, though that detail didn't stick in Andy's mind the way it should have. Nothing was in her mind except that there was her Quynh after all this time. Her fears, her apprehension, her concerns about how angry Quynh had to be – all gone in the face of having her back. Andy slammed her car into park and jumped out, running around it and toward her lover. "Quynh! Quynh!"

Quynh dropped gracefully to the ground, the knife still in hand. Andy swept into her, embracing her and holding her tight. It felt perfect. She felt perfect – the same as always, the same as she had for thousands of years. A sob tore itself from Andy's throat and she held Quynh so tightly that neither of them could breathe, but neither of them let go, either. Quynh's embrace of her was slower, but just as firm. She hadn't let go of the knife.

"Andromache," Quynh murmured lovingly when they finally eased enough to take in air.

"Quynh, Quynh," Andy kept saying. Her hands skated over Quynh's back. Her eyes searched the woman's face. No, there was something different there. There was much different there. Andy tried to catch her breath and pay attention to the woman before her rather than the one she'd remembered for all these years. This was not a time to live in the past. Her heart was hammering in her chest, though. She felt light-headed, almost faint. After all this time, here Quynh was, flesh warm under her fingers, her arms and chest still tingling in the memory of their embrace.

"Did you die by fire after they took me away?"

It took a few seconds for the oddly accented words to make sense in Andy's brain. It had been centuries since she'd heard that language. She nodded once she understood.

"How many times?" Quynh asked.

"Just … once. I was saved."

"How was it? The death?" Quynh was smirking, her eyes full of cruelty and mischief at the same time. She asked like she was inquiring after the taste of a dish.

The knot in Andy's stomach was back. "As painful as we'd expected. You keep healing it until eventually you can't. The recovery takes a long time."

Quynh sneered. "Not five hundred years."

"No, not five hundred years." Andy couldn't handle the wrath she could see in Quynh's eyes, behind her words. Did she think Andy's love had wavered? "But I would take it for five hundred years over dying without you."

"If only I could grant that … and let you die for five hundred years."

"Quynh?" Her voice broke on the name. Her heart seemed to skip a beat.

"You _left_ me."

The words were like a slap. "Quynh, I _tried_!" She would have moved heaven and earth if it would have brought Quynh back, but there was no way. Even immortal, there was simply no way.

"I was alone. You didn't come for me like you'd always promised you would. You _left_ me."

Andy shook her head, but she already knew no amount of detail or denial would change Quynh's mind. "I searched for you. I was searching for you when you finally escaped."

"On my own! With no help from you! One death by fire does not equal five hundred years at the bottom of the sea!"

"I didn't say it did." There was a growl in Andy's voice now. Her own anger was finally igniting at the injustice of Quynh's accusations and demands for the impossible.

"We should have suffered together!" Quynh declared. "Instead, you were here. I've seen how important I was to you. An eternity of agony for me – nothing from you. Yet within a day that I touch that lowlife, here you are."

"Quynh …" Andy shook her head slowly, searching Quynh's face for any sign of compassion or humanity. She worried for what Quynh had already done to Booker and feared what she might yet do to the others. She pitied Quynh that she'd become this. There had always been a tendency, but never this much.

"You said you would be with me until the end. This _is_ the end, Andromache!" She stabbed her in the chest, right down to the hilt. The blow felt unreal, like it had only happened in Andy's imagination, in some fever-dream. She looked down at it dumbly where Quynh's hand rested on the handle of some steak knife. Leaning forward, Quynh snarled, "And I will start by cutting your heart out like you have cut mine out!"

This was real. It had to be real. She needed to wake up and treat it as real. Andy shoved her away violently. Quynh held onto the knife and ended up between Andy and the way out of the alley. Andy backed up, bleeding down her front. Her chest hurt. Her heart felt … wrong. She blinked and shook her head. It was hard to think. Adrenaline should have been helping her. It should have cleared away the fog and made everything simple but she was still confused. There were tears in her eyes and a treasonous part of herself thought she should just die here and now as payment for not being able to get Quynh out of the sea.

Quynh leaped at her, fast as ever and knocked her to the ground, following her down. Her tells were all wrong, all different, and Andy's head was still swimming. Another blow with the knife and then Andy caught the next, gripping Quynh's wrist and twisting it, throwing the knife aside. She couldn't just die. What about Booker? What about Nile? Joe, Nicky? What would happen between them and Quynh if they found her murdered in the alley?

Quynh didn't move. She was staring at the blood on Andy's shirt. She reached out very slowly with her free hand and tugged the fabric aside. Andy let her head loll back, thumping against the cobblestones. They weren't fighting anymore. The two puncture wounds were still there, dribbling blood in rapid surges that matched her drumming heartbeat. Quynh's words reverted to an even older language. They came as slowly as her hand had moved. "You do not heal."

"Lykon." That was all she needed to say. Quynh would understand the rest. Tears leaked out of Andy's eyes, falling over her temples to disappear into her hair – tears for Lykon whom she'd loved and lost too soon, tears for Joe, Nicky, Nile, and Book who would lose her in turn, tears for Quynh who had stabbed her with no expectation of killing her permanently and would now have to live with that guilt, and tears for herself. She'd never wanted to die bringing so much misery to the people she cared about.

Quynh swallowed. She traced the wounds and her face went through a range of emotions – grief, pity, and finally a bitter anger. "Die without me, then." It wasn't snarled or spat at her. It was almost dull. Empty.

Andy shut her eyes as more tears spilled down. She'd fucked this up from the beginning. If they'd taken those zealots seriously in England, if they'd broken their hands to escape their manacles like Quynh had suggested, if she'd kept looking once Quynh was lost at sea, if she'd made Booker a part of the team and known earlier that Quynh was still alive, if they hadn't exiled him so that Quynh found him alone and vulnerable … it wasn't all her fault, but Andy could see the things she should have done differently. She'd done better with Nile, but it was so little, too late.

 _Die without me, then. Die alone. Die apart. Die like Lykon. Die like all those people we cut down in battle without a second thought, never stopping to care about them, cheering their deaths afterward and kicking their bodies out of the way. Die like an animal._ Quynh stood and walked away, heading further down the alley. Andy didn't matter anymore. She was just one more person in Quynh's life whom she'd outlived. Andy knew exactly how that felt.

She lay there, staring up at the sky above. It was bright, blue with the mottled grey of smoke wafting across it. Finally, the answer was different: 'Is this it? Will this time be the one?' All those years, ending like this – in an alley, abandoned and rejected, her companion of three thousand years deserting her to her fate. She tried to sob, but it felt like she was choking. She thought of all those dead they'd left behind them over all those years. It was definitely wrong.

In the distance, Andy heard Nicky's voice questioning, "Andy?" and then raised in alarm, "There!" She reached up and wiped away the tears before anyone else could see them. She had a family and at least some of them were safe. She had people who loved her even if Quynh wasn't among them at the moment. There was such a pressure on her chest. She knew she was bleeding out inside. She wished she had more time with them.

Nicky arrived, Nile right behind him. Nile said, "Oh no. What happened?"

Nicky's eyes went up, probably to Quynh's figure in the distance. She grabbed his ankle and told him, "No." He struggled with that. He didn't move, but she could feel it thrum through him. He let out a shaky breath and looked down at her, his face a mask of cold, righteous fury. Andy said, "Nicky? I want you here, with me." She wanted her family with her – not tearing each other apart at the other end of the alley while she bled out. That wouldn't help anyone. Nicky went to his knees next to her, shaking his head and teeth clenched, but he stayed.

Nile crouched on the other side of her. "What happened to you?" She pulled back the shirt the same way Quynh had. There was blood everywhere and it was still welling out.

Andy said calmly, "She stabbed me in the heart and left me to die. This is the end. It's over."

"It is not _over_!' Nile exclaimed vehemently. "There is an ambulance right there!" She pointed. That was funny, Andy thought. Medicine was a joke, a ritual to make you feel better. When it was time, it was time and right now was very close to her time.

"I'll get the gurney," Nicky said, getting to his feet with renewed purpose.

Oh well. They felt they had to do something. Andy didn't have the energy to argue with them.

Joe came up with a ragged, scorched-looking Booker stopping several steps behind him. Andy was relieved to see them. Booker's skin looked strange, but he hadn't been cooked to death. He'd be fine if he wasn't already. "Quynh?" Joe asked.

"Yes," Nicky hissed in a tight, furious voice. He opened the doors to the ambulance and jerked out the gurney.

"I didn't tell her," Booker said, so quietly it was barely heard. He touched his throat. He was looking down at Andy, brows turned up in concern.

"I know you didn't," Andy said. "She didn't know until she stabbed me. I think she thought …" Andy suspected Quynh had thought to cut her heart out in a painful, dramatic, ironic gesture, a cathartic and literal expression of her pain, and one that she was fully confident that Andy would regenerate from in a matter of minutes or hours – no permanent harm done, aside from her feelings. She hoped Quynh wouldn't have done it if she'd known she wouldn't heal. But it was too late for that and Quynh couldn't take staying by her side to watch her bleed out, once she knew there was no coming back for Andy. "It doesn't matter. I broke my promise. My life is the payment. No revenge."

"Maybe _you_ broke your promise," Joe said hotly, "but if she takes you from us, she will never know peace!"

She wanted to argue with Joe, but she didn't have the strength. Nicky collapsed the gurney next to Andy, so it was as close to ground level as it could be.

"Where is she?" This was from Booker.

Andy suspected what he was asking. He was still holding his throat. Quynh had hurt him in some way that physical healing had little to do with. She was good at that. Andy said, "You stay with them. Protect each other."

"You stay with _us_ ," Joe corrected. "We are not 'them'! You are still with us, Andy."

"Joe, help," Nile said. He knelt at Andy's waist. Nile took her shoulders and Nicky her legs. They lifted her onto the gurney. Her head was spinning. She hung onto the sides of the thin pad. Nicky elevated the gurney as soon as she was secure. Booker climbed inside the back of the ambulance.

Andy struggled to get a good breath. "I've died enough times to know I'm not going to make it to the hospital. I'm not going to make it at all. It's okay. I've done what I meant to do. Quynh's back. It's over."

Nicky wheeled the gurney to the ambulance and Booker helped pull it in. Book looked down on her much as he had after she'd been caught at Copley's, when he'd tried to apologize. He gave a small, worried shake of his head, his expression … frightened. "Not like this," he whispered. "Not like this, Andy." There wasn't anything she could do about it, though. She was dying whether she wanted to or not. He moved to extend the gurney and get it back up to normal height.

Nile climbed inside and said crossly, "Andy, we're just gonna ignore you until you talk sense. Someone get up front and drive." She thought she had been making sense. It wasn't what they wanted to hear, but it was sensible, right? She supposed she should start thinking about her last words. They already knew she loved them. What was left that was worth saying, that would make someone happy and give some meaning to her long life?

Nicky said, "I'll go move the car."

Joe said, "I'll drive the ambulance."

Nicky shut the doors. She blacked out unexpectedly, then came to as the vehicle lurched into motion. Nile was trying to do something medical-related to her. Andy grabbed her forearm, realizing what she needed to say. "One last thing," she said, fighting for every word. They came out in a forced whisper. "Six thousand, seven hundred, thirty-five."

"What?"

"My age."

"Oh for God's sake, Andy! Jesus help me, I am not losing a fucking relic over this shit!"

She blacked out again, this time for good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote Joe's rescue of Booker from the fire and posted it as Tinder (https://archiveofourown.org/works/29137215), for those who was a little more angst and hurt/comfort.


	9. Team Building

She heard Nile laughing. It was a beautiful, relaxed sound with nothing of the fear that had been in Nile's voice before. Time must have passed. Andy felt her awareness slowly increasing, although everything sounded like she was hearing it from the bottom of a well. Her body didn't hurt anymore. She felt like she was floating. It was enough to make her wonder if she was wrong to be an atheist.

Nile's voice: "I noticed the way you were using that gurney and I told myself, 'That is a man who has done this before' and that's when it clicked. Mr. 'My Blood Type is C'! Ha. So what is it, anyway?"

Nicky's voice, more smug than normal: "O-negative. Same as Joe's."

Nile again: "What's yours?"

Booker's voice was soft. "I don't know."

"Oh?" Nile said. "So you weren't lying about knowing nothing about medicine? The only one among us who was telling the truth?"

"I know a little," Booker said. "I think she's awake."

"Is she?" Nile asked.

"Her breathing," Booker observed.

Andy snorted. She was slacking if Booker could read her. It was only then she realized she _was_ breathing. She was alive. She was definitely alive. She opened her eyes and blinked up at them in wonder. Booker was sitting directly across from her on a tiny jump seat that folded down from the wall. Nicky was behind her head. Nile was further down, near her hips. Everyone was accounted for except- "Where's Joe?"

"Her first words!" Joe crowed from further behind her. "And she wants to know about me!" He laughed cheerfully. Andy relaxed. Everyone was safe, alive, and together.

Nile grinned and said, "He's in the driver's seat. We're parked right now. Once it was clear … everything was going to take care of itself."

Andy reached up to her chest. She could breathe easily. The wounds were gone. The blood was still there. In fact, there was a lot of blood, along with an IV line that ran from her left antecubital to Nile's. It was red. "You … is that a transfusion?" Maybe there was some magic in the medical ritual after all.

"Yeah," Nile said, looking proud of herself. "If you were sure we couldn't get to the hospital in time, then maybe desperate measures were called for. I figured I wasn't going to run out of blood any time soon. And it turned out Nicky here is better at dropping an IV line than I was."

"Lots of humanitarian work," Nicky told her, beaming. To Andy, he said, "Then you started healing."

Joe's voice filtered back, "Also, I have no idea where the hospital is, or how to work this radio to get directions."

Nicky said, "They're going to be looking for this ambulance very soon."

Andy sat up, marveling at the new life she'd been given. It had been a long time – thousands of years – since coming back to life had felt like a miracle instead of the resumption of a misery. Physically, she felt fine. Better than fine, even. She hadn't felt this good in the last six months, that was for sure. She pulled out the IV line and watched as the spot vanished as soon as she did. She grinned toothily at how seeing herself heal felt special again. The end of the line dripped rapidly until Nile detached hers as well. The spot there healed exactly the same. Andy smirked. "Then let's get out of here."

* * *

"Do we know where we're going?" Nile asked as the group of them piled out of the vehicle.

Nicky said, "Away from the stolen emergency vehicle that has a dead man in the floorboard."

"That way, then," Nile said, pointing down a street. They set off – Joe on one end, then Booker, then Andy, then Nile, and Nicky on the other side. It felt good to have the group together again – all but Quynh. But Quynh was out of the sea. She was free. She could take care of herself. She needed some time and distance and opportunity to come to terms with what had happened to her. Andy was still surprised to have survived the first stage of the process. She breathed deep and was thrilled at being free of pains both large and small.

Nicky nodded approval to Nile's suggestion. "More tourists that way. Good choice."

"No," Nile said. "I've just never seen the Eiffel Tower before. I've flown into Paris, driven through it four or five times, and _still_ haven't seen anything here but suburbs and highways! This place is _packed_ with cool stuff to see and I haven't seen any of it!"

Joe chuckled. "Ah, the wonders of the world you will see, Nile, with your long life ahead of you. You know, if one of us loses immortality, we now know a possible way to fix it."

Nicky cautioned, "We have donated blood many times. It did not make anyone immortal."

Joe said to him, "Maybe it only works on former immortals. That would be enough for us."

"How do you know I'm immortal?" Andy asked. That turned heads to her. "Maybe the effect will wear off after I metabolize whatever she gave me. We don't know what the future holds. And … I kind of like it that way." There were layers of possibility opening up to her. It was a lot to think about. Not having the answers was exhilarating all on its own.

They walked quietly for a few paces, before Nile said, "I'm still going to dream of her, aren't I?"

Andy chuckled at how near a miss Nile and Quynh had had. "Probably. It's not like we've ever tested exactly how close you can get to someone without the dreams stopping. But if you still have them, at least she's not drowning anymore. They shouldn't be as bad."

"That'll be an improvement," Nile said. She looked at Booker. "You won't have them all, will you?" He shook his head and said nothing, but it had to be a relief for him.

Joe said, "For formality's sake, we should discuss the exile. Given Quynh's return," he shot a meaningful look at Booker, "I think we should rescind it."

"I agree," was all Andy said. Nile nodded.

Nicky said, "I want to know what happened."

Booker cleared his throat softly. After a few more paces, he said, "She asked me to help her find Andromache. I refused. She, um, tied me up. And then … burned the place down."

"That's it?" Nile asked. "You are leaving so much out. And leaving things out is what caused all this. From the beginning. What this group needs, badly, is communication."

Booker exhaled tensely. He rubbed his throat, then thrust his hands into his pockets as though to keep them away from his neck. "The details are unpleasant."

"Tell us," Nicky said gently. "So that we may carry this as well. If we are family, then this is not yours alone."

Booker gave another tense exhalation and studied the trees they were walking under as they entered the tower plaza. "She stabbed me … in the face. The eyes. The nose. The teeth. The temple. Repeatedly. She cut off my finger so she could unlock my phone with it. She killed me several times. She tied me … with wire."

He made a gesture to Joe, who nodded in confirmation. Joe said, "I had to get help from the firemen. They had questions we didn't answer, but they cut him free."

Booker said, "My hands died, but they ..." He pulled his hands from his pockets, made fists, released them, then put his hands back in his pockets. They might have 'died', but as they hadn't been amputated or decayed enough for the body to reject them, they'd healed fine. It must have been agonizing, though. "She cut my throat. She stole my voice. The first thing she tried to set on fire was the bed she'd put me on, but it wouldn't catch. She settled for burning down everything else. She left me there when I wasn't useful anymore."

"Oh," was all Nile said, but there was a lot of feeling in it. Nile was right – they needed to hear this. They needed to know the details not just to help Booker deal with it, but so they understood what Quynh had done. This was a transgression.

"Let me see your finger," Joe said. Booker pulled his right hand from his pocket and showed it, fingers splayed. The index finger wasn't quite done regrowing. It was close enough to pass for someone who didn't know what his hands normally looked like – long, straight, well-proportioned digits and not with one a little thinner than the others. Amputations could take days or even longer to regrow, but a finger was small enough to restore itself in hours. Quynh had taken it on the second knuckle.

"She stole your voice?" Andy asked.

Booker swallowed and looked at Joe again. Joe said, "There was a … device? It kept him from healing his throat. There was a clip over the vocal cords. Very simple. But effective."

Booker said, "She also killed my landlord and two policemen. Or at least one. I couldn't see the other, but Joe said he saw their bodies in the hall. I was, ah, not alive when he carried me out." Joe nodded.

"And the ambulance driver?" Nicky asked, looking to Andy.

Andy turned to him. "Quynh."

Nicky said, "She is not well."

"Give her time," Andy said.

"Give her time?" Nile questioned.

"She's been through a lot," Andy said. "It doesn't mean we condone it or support it." She looked over at Joe. "What she did to Book was wrong."

"She killed you," Joe said seriously. "In addition to that."

Andy nodded. "That's between me and her."

"No, it is not," Joe said sternly.

"Yes, it is," Andy snapped back.

"No." This time it was Nile. "It isn't. We're a team. We're a family. That's what you keep saying, right? Someone attacking _you_ _or Booker_ matters to all of us! That could have been _any_ of us."

Andy looked at Booker. He was staring forward, finding the Eiffel Tower suddenly very interesting to look at. Of course, he wouldn't have anything to say here, probably (and rightfully) pleased beyond measure people were taking his side. She checked in with Nicky. The sides of his mouth were tense, like he was holding back a smile. He definitely wasn't defending her. And why would he? She was basically arguing that Quynh had the right to torture or kill them at will just because Andy had broken a promise with her.

They were right. "Fine," Andy said, exasperated at how her team had gone from three men who called her 'boss' and followed orders without question to four people who all thought she was wrong with half of them willing to tell her that to her face. Not that she was complaining, really. She needed people willing to point out when she was off her rocker. But she _still_ felt compelled to defend Quynh. "She didn't expect me to die."

"That may be true," Joe muttered, looking away. It was something of a concession.

Nile wasn't buying it, though. "So this great warrior," she said dubiously, "she stabbed you in the heart twice by accident?"

"She didn't know I'd _die_." The morality of killing each other and inflicting pain was something they needed to talk about at some point, because Andy couldn't even say she was clear on it herself. Booker acted traumatized and Andy was still telling herself she was fine even though she knew herself well enough to know that wasn't true. What she did know was that she'd been with Quynh for thousands of years and her desire to defend her extended even to this otherwise black-and-white situation.

Nile looked at her askance, but she seemed amused under the judgement. "You have a lot more patience than I would."

Andy shoved her playfully, countering Nile's judgmental tone. "I'm a lot older than you are. I'm allowed."

Nile grinned. "A _lot_ older. That's amazing stuff. Are you sure about that?"

"Quynh and I counted it out a long time ago. We dated it to the death of the then-current pharaoh, along with some other people who aren't remembered anymore. From there, you count forward and add the two numbers. There might be some errors, but it's within a few decades."

"You know?" Joe asked Andy.

She looked over to him. His curiosity was obvious. "Yes."

"And how long is it?" he pressed when she didn't say more.

"That's for Nile to know and you to tease out of her."

He snorted and looked at Nile, who said nothing but looked delighted to have such a secret. Andy glanced at Booker, who had cast her a hooded glance that told her he'd overheard her deathbed confession in the ambulance. He smiled to himself briefly, delighted in his own way – he knew, and he probably imagined no one else knew he knew. That all depended on who Nicky and Joe were watching and how good they were at connecting the dots. But even if they did, it wasn't like he was going to tell them. He was good at keeping secrets.

"We need to settle the matter of the exile," Nicky said, bringing the subject back around. "What did she use you for?"

Booker sobered. "I don't know. She was looking for Andy. How did you find me?"

"Nile's dreams and your phone," Andy said. "She used you as bait."

He snorted softly. "She has _my_ phone now. And my finger. You could call her."

"That's disgusting," Nile muttered.

"I'm not going to call her," Andy said firmly.

"Booker betrayed us," Nicky said. "Not Quynh."

Joe opened his mouth to argue but shut it when Booker stopped walking and turned to Nicky. The rest stopped as well, forming a loose circle. Earnestly, Booker said, "Nicky, I didn't tell her _anything_. I did not," he paused, his voice thicker with emotion, "betray you _again_. Not any of you. And especially not Andy. Not a second time, Nicky." He shook his head slowly.

Nicky nodded. The group was quiet, attention having been drawn back to the fact that not all members had voted. Nicky said, "There is this – and it is not a formality – but this is the same pattern as we saw at the Charlie house. You appeared to be a helpless victim and in the confusion surrounding that, one or two of us were drawn off, isolated, and attacked."

"Holy shit," Nile said quietly. "You think all of _that_ was staged?" She gestured in a direction Andy presumed was toward the fire. She'd lost her bearings when she'd passed out.

" _Quynh_ staged it," Booker said tensely. His face flushed slightly. His fists balled in his pockets. Joe touched his fingers to Booker's arm in reassurance.

"It is a pattern," Nicky said calmly. "I have concerns. I am being honest with you about these concerns because I respect you."

"I have different concerns," Joe said, stepping forward to put himself next to Nicky. He faced Andy instead of Booker. "Quynh is out there and she is not a friend. If we stay together, then when she returns, she does it on our terms," he pointed at the ground in the middle of the circle, "not hers. If we keep Booker with us, then there is no chance of her beginning some cycle of retribution between our groups."

"She's not a group," Andy said.

Joe said, "She is if we kick Booker out and she recruits him." Booker gave him an 'are you insane?' look. Joe forged on, "It is only a matter of time until she discovers you live. You may not fear what will happen then but I do. We take fewer chances if Booker is with _us_. Safer for him, and safer for us."

Joe was right, too. Despite Book's reaction, they couldn't cut him loose on exile and expect him not to eventually seek Quynh out. Because he would, for the same reason the exile had been the worst punishment they could give him. He didn't want to be alone. There was no telling how that relationship would end up, but Andy's gut told her it wouldn't be good.

Andy nodded. "Well, I have ulterior motives, too, as long as we're discussing our reasoning. I failed Booker, several times, as a leader and as a friend. I knew what was important to him and I disregarded it. None of this would have happened if I'd done my job right. Some of this is my fault. Making him suffer for it is wrong. I want a chance to make it right." The look Booker gave her was steady and quiet.

The group was silent for a moment, then everyone looked to Nile. "Ah," she said, "I didn't have any ulterior motives. I just thought … he didn't cooperate with her, and he got tortured and hurt standing up for us, so it should be over."

Booker smiled tightly and reached up to scratch his forehead. Nile pleased him. Andy had to admit to the same, given the refreshing lack of complicated, layered motivations. Nile didn't have centuries or millennia of experience coloring every choice she made, making everything an endlessly complicated decision tree of options. She just said what she thought and that was that.

"I agree to ending the exile," Nicky said, abrupt and formal.

"What about the pattern?" Booker asked, turning sharp eyes to him.

"You are easier to watch this way." Nicky gave him a faint, sly smile. Booker's smile was easier to see. He knew someone giving him a second chance no matter how Nicky cloaked it. He stepped forward to clap Nicky on the shoulder and then hugged him. He murmured something to Nicky, who patted his side as they parted and nodded agreement to whatever had been said.

"That settles that," Andy said. They turned and started back down the boulevard.

Andy slid an arm around Booker's waist, turning her head up the little bit needed to look at him. There was wariness in his eyes. Uncertainty. She'd never done something like this with him before. Quietly, he said, "While I appreciate the welcome, the price has not been paid for what I did."

She told him, "I have some ideas about that."

"Hm." He put his arm around her shoulders. "I'll be interested to hear them." She nodded.

"Would you look at that," Nile said, gaping up at the tower above them and moving forward faster to see it.

Nicky and Joe moved up next to her. Joe said, "Let's go over there where you can look up underneath it." Andy watched as the three left her alone with Booker, but out in the open where they could keep an eye on them. Once again, they hadn't collaborated – they'd just mutually arrived at the same conclusion and moved to make it happen. They worked well together. She found a railing to lean against that was around a grassy area.

Booker stopped a stride back, touching over his right index finger. It would keep hurting until it was finished regrowing. "How much time do you think until Quynh returns?" He had a polite and diffident tone, trying to make a question that was almost painful for him to ask into something casual and unimportant-sounding.

Andy smirked to herself. "Nile was right."

"About what?"

About the emotional distance between Andy and Booker being a critical part of why he'd sold the group out to Copley and/or Merrick. But she didn't tell him that because she was still working out what she could do to close that emotional distance. Andy turned to look at him over her shoulder. "About Quynh. I'm not waiting on her, Book. I promised her to the end and the end has passed. That's what she said before she walked off. So we're done."

He nodded slowly, taking the weight of the word: "Done."

"Rough break-up," she said with a self-deprecating chuckle, turning away again. "You want to pay that price? Help me through this. Because it's not going to be pretty. I don't want to die anymore. But it's going to hard to live for a while."

He moved up next to her at the railing, putting his hands on it. "Help you …?"

"I've mourned her for so long. I was with her for longer. And it ends like this? I don't want to go crawling after her. I don't want to be that weak." She looked up at him beseechingly. "If I'm alone, I will be. I'm already making excuses for her." She let her emotions show instead of hiding them. Her eyes watered.

She hurt inside. Quynh's words had cut her to the quick and Quynh's decision to leave her to die alone and unloved was a kick in the face. But she was human and there was a part of her that kept saying she and Quynh could work this out. It would be alright once Quynh calmed down. Surely Quynh hadn't intended to kill her. She'd just been angry and the anger was Andy's fault and-

She knew that part of her thinking was wrong. "I need help in ways I can't tell them." She gestured at the others. "I need someone in ways I won't ask of them. And you're handy." She ached inside worse than that gunshot wound. This one would take even longer to heal. She didn't know if it ever would.

She wanted someone to hold in the meantime. Someone who had some understanding of the situation, had some empathy for losing a loved one, someone she could be honest with who couldn't tell her to fuck off and deal with it herself. Not that Joe or Nicky ever would tell her that, but she didn't want their pity. It was selfish and cowardly of her to make it a condition of Booker getting right with the group, but if she didn't, she was going to fall apart and run back to Quynh and make everything worse.

He put his arm around her shoulders again. "I'm 'handy'. Such a ringing endorsement." He sounded amused.

"It's a debt. That means I get to set the terms." Her voice was a little shaky, but the sun was still shining. His arm was warm and solid around her. She'd fall apart later.

"I agree," he said. She looked up at him, wondering if he meant he agreed to the principle, or the as-yet-undefined terms. He understood her look and clarified, "To whatever terms you set."

She sighed and leaned into him. "We're both in such shit shape," she said, shaking her head slowly.

He gave her a squeeze. "Misery loves company."

"Exactly."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those interested in a little more of what Quynh was up to with Booker, you can find it here https://archiveofourown.org/works/29167635.


End file.
